What Jesus and Resurrection Are Really About

This is an audacious sermon title, so I will try to explain. 

First, I owe much here to John Dominic Crossan, and his books of the past two decades, especially

        In Search of Paul, God and Empire, Render Unto Caesar, and everything else.

Only once did I preach a sermon which led people to walk out of the worship service.

It was a sermon against guns, after John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980.

That probably means that none of my sermons since then were challenging in any meaningful way.

If you choose to walk out today, at least listen to Jesus and Paul.

I observe that most Christians find it difficult to express what they believe about God and Jesus, 

the resurrection, the Trinity, and all the other stuff we talk about in church. 

I’ll bet most of you would be hard pressed to explain to others what you believe. 

It’s not your fault.

Christian teachings and beliefs are complicated; and some don’t make much sense.

I have an easy and quick fix to this: Christianity isn’t or shouldn’t be about belief.

Christianity should be about following Jesus.

That’s how it began, with Jesus asking men and women to “follow me.”

But this is the season of Easter, so I want to focus on the resurrection today.

We can observe that the four gospels have a hard time explaining the resurrection, 

        so I skipped them this morning.

The first or earliest gospel, Mark, doesn’t have much resurrection at all.

It tells of women going to the tomb of Jesus. 

They found “A young man in a white robe... who said to them, 

‘He [meaning Jesus] has been raised; he is not here.’ 

They fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, 

and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

That’s how the gospel ends; the other things you will find there at the end 

of the chapter are commonly understood to be later additions.

The truth is that the gospel writers didn’t know how to explain the resurrection.

The first followers of Jesus experienced him as alive even though he had been crucified.

How do you write about such an intense experience?

So they told of an empty tomb and of appearances of Jesus to some of his followers.

It wasn’t until 400 years later that artists began to depict the resurrection.

They showed sleeping guards, an open tomb, and a risen Christ.

Later artists added women to the scene. 

Within another 200 years the Eastern Orthodox churches were using an icon, a painting on wood, 

a sacred image used for worship and teaching, 

                entitled “the resurrection” or “h’anastacis.” in Greek.

                        (The Russian girl’s name Anastasia means resurrection.)

This icon gives an idea of resurrection that we find unusual 

in our Western, Catholic or Protestant churches.

In the Western artistic tradition, Jesus emerges from the tomb alone and victorious. 

This famous icon shows two empty coffins from which Christ is pulling Adam and Eve 

        by the hands, up and out of hades.

On the left of the icon, are David and Solomon, 

representing those who died before Jesus’ crucifixion.

On the right side of the icon is Abel, the first person to die as a result of Cain’s violence,

        with John the Baptist, Jesus’ teacher.

                [wow- Abel is remembered!] 

The Eastern Churches emphasize the resurrection of all humanity, symbolized by Adam and Eve, 

whereas in our Western Churches, it is everyone for himself or herself as individuals.

The icon focuses as much on us as on the Christ.

The resurrection is about our liberation.

We are important, and we have to ask, “What happens to us, to humanity now that Christ is raised?” 

What did the earliest Christians think would happen to them after the resurrection of Christ?

We can imagine much confusion after Jesus’ crucifixion.

The leader was dead and gone, or he had appeared to a few, but not to everyone.

All of us since then still behave badly, suffer, and die.

So the author of Luke and Acts speaks of our living as in an “in-between time,”

        between the crucifixion and an expected return of Christ.

I think Jesus had another idea, one that escaped most of his followers.

Mark had it just about right.

Some scholars who study Mark say that his message is not comforting.

If we read that short gospel story without the endings added later,

we get the idea that if we are to follow Jesus after he has gone, 

in the way of his life and death, we will probably be killed.

If we want to faithfully follow Jesus, we will die.

Not a comforting message of earthly success. 

So the resurrection is about our living in new ways because Christ is risen.

I saw a sign on a church board last week, proclaiming “Happy Easter!”

In so much as Easter is a symbol of new birth and the return of spring, that’s great.

But maybe the sign should say “Christ is Risen. This is scary.”

If we think about these things, then some of Jesus’ teachings 

and the crazy rants of Paul begin to make sense.

“Turn the other cheek, Love your enemies, walk an extra mile.”

These are basic teachings of Jesus from the sermon on the mount, 

        and they are actions that would get you in big trouble.

The truth is that the teachings of Jesus and Paul are the ways of non-violent resistance to power.

Jesus was opposed to the Roman Empire, but did not participate in violent resistance like the Zealots.

Rome killed Jesus because he preached about God’s Empire as opposed to Rome’s,

        and led a group that followed Jesus and not the Emperor.

“When Paul says ‘you have been raised with Christ,’ he means ‘you should be living risen lives.’”

A risen life is one that is not afraid of death 

because you have the faith, the trust, the confidence of Jesus.

It is a life totally committed to the teachings and example of Jesus.

A risen life is different from the lives that almost all of us live.

I preached here last year about Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one 

        who discovered in himself this faith and this commitment in his opposition to Hitler.

But we know little about nonviolent resistance.

It is not a large part of our experience and we are not taught it.

We are taught that war and violence are good or to be accepted.

We do know that Martin Luther King, Jr. taught and led people in non-violent action.

But we may not know of Bayard Rustin to taught non-violence to King.

[Check out the film, Rustin on Netflix.]

We have heard of Mahatma Ghandi,

but we may not know that Ghandi learned it from Leo Tolstoy, 

         who after writing such big books as War and Peace and Anna Karena,

         wrote many short stories about living simply, 

             peacefully, and non-violently as Jesus taught.

Non-violent resistance has a long history, but it is not popular to say the least.

        In fact most people are opposed to it.

It seems like suicide and failure to protect our families and our nation.

We have been taught to prefer violent retribution in response to violence.

This seems reasonable when we consider the attack on Pearl Harbor and our response to it.

Our response in that instance seems understandable, but it was explicitly vengeful.

What we believe today is the same thing that the Romans believed:

That violence produces peace.

When Jesus spoke of peacemaking, he spoke of love and forgiveness,

        but we see nothing odd about naming the Colt .45 repeating pistol “the peacemaker.”

                [BTW, The Pentagon and the US Army has long struggled 

                        with the concepts of “peacemaking” and “peacekeeping,” 

                settling on achieving stability (operations to restore order) with violence, 

                           and remaining neutral with policing.]

War does not make peace.

We have been taught to believe that an eye for an eye is a summary of Jewish law. It is not.

Love and justice are OT law.

We have been taught that God exacts revenge on God’s enemies,

but that is only one strand of the Bible.

We have two images of Jesus; one on a donkey as a messenger of peace on Palm Sunday,

        and one on a warhorse bringing violence to sinners in the book of Revelation.

Because of the way the Bible was written, edited, and assembled 

we are led to believe that the teaching of the book of Revelation 

is superior to the teachings of Jesus in the gospels.

This leads to images of Jesus carrying an AR-15, presumably to set right all the wrongs in the world.

Jesus, however, was about forgiveness and loving our enemies,

        but mostly we do not do those things.

Paul offers this suggestion, shocking your enemies by helping them:

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, if your enemies are hungry, feed them;

  if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, 

for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” 

“Heaping burning coals on their heads” 

is a violent image to explain shaming those who are violent to us 

by demonstrating our unwillingness to do as they do.

Or maybe it is an image of someone’s face “turning red,” blushing, in shame 

for what they know they have done wrong.

Doing good to those who do us wrong

prevents us from allowing others to control us and our behavior.

When we respond to violence with violence 

we are doing what the other wants us to do.

Jesus and Paul were teaching non-violence 

but it is not easy to see when everyone has told us otherwise 

that Jesus supports us in going to war.

“Presenting your bodies as a living sacrifice” is non-violent resistance,

risking our lives for what we believe.

Paul says “Do not be conformed to this age” of Roman values and violence,

“but be transformed by the renewing of the mind,” 

He means for us to learn and practice active, organized, non-violent resistance.

This is what many Jews were doing before and after Jesus.

One great example was the Roman plan a few years after Jesus was crucified

to install a giant statue of Caligula as Jupiter in the Jerusalem temple.

A general strike was called.

Tens of thousands of Jews showed up for “sit-ins”

offering themselves for death if the statue was set up.

The Romans relented.

There are dozens of examples through history, many in our own time, 

of non-violent protests bringing about dramatic change 

in government policies and the governments themselves.

The extent that Jesus and Paul were practicing and teaching 

non-violence was not well understood until recently.

There are a number of good books on this

A search on Amazon or at the library will uncover them.

All of this is personal for me because I became a Christian in 1966,

        which led me to protest the American war in Vietnam.

As a Christian, as a pacifist, in witness to Jesus, I refused induction into the army, twice.

I prepared to go to prison, but I entered seminary, and a year later

I won a lawsuit against the Selective Service System and the Attorney General. 

I did not enter seminary to become a pastor, but to learn how to be a Christian in the world.

I failed in this because I did become a pastor, a “professional Christian”

        and was no longer “in the world” without the backing of the church.

I failed in peacemaking, too, because over the years I left peacemaking behind, 

        believing that I had done my part.

When I wrote my memoir a few years ago, 

        I thought that peacemaking might be the central theme of my life.

But I realized that it had occupied only a few years of my life.

I did not live up to the teachings of Jesus and Paul.

I reclaim it today, but I realize that few have lived up to those teachings, and few will.

This failure of Christianity to live up to Jesus is the tragedy of the way of the world

        and the way of the churches. 

The world will not succeed in its greedy and violent drive for ever increasing wealth and power, 

        because the world is busy destroying itself in its search to elevate the self over others.

And the churches, failing to understand Jesus, continues to seek salvation as rescue 

        rather than as healing and making individuals and society whole.

The denomination put out a poster in 1973 and I put it on a wall in our church fellowship hall.

It said “For Christ’s Sake – Do something!”

The Session said it had to come down. 

I still want to know why.

The Future of the Church May Be God-less

The Presbyterian Outlook isn't interested in printing this (I wonder why), so I am publishing it here: 

Two recent articles in the Presbyterian Outlook state that “The future of the PC(USA) is pastor-less, and that’s OK,” by Catherine Neelly Burton, and “The future of the PC(USA) is being reformed by God,” by Allison Unroe. The first describes the decline of congregations, especially rural ones, and the decline of small towns in rural America. The second raises questions about the value we do or do not place on “theologically educated and ethically trained pastoral leadership.” A look into the recent past and a larger context is needed to address these issues. Active, engaged church members and leaders only see the problems from inside the churches and are no longer in conversation with those who have left, who would have much to say about churches and the need for educated pastors.  

I saw these issues close up during the 1990's, when I was Associate for Professional Development in Louisville, and then Executive Presbyter/Stated Clerk in Great Rivers Presbytery. “Leadership” for times of change was the cry of the day in reaction to “management” which had been fitting for a seemingly unchanging church in the 50's. Presbyterian denominations had begun their membership decline in 1965 when I became a church member, and even when I graduated from seminary in 1972 my professors assumed that I would be a custodian of a small part of a large, stable and secure institution. Many of us could see in the 90's that the mainline churches would fall off a cliff when the “greatest generation,” the largest cohort within the churches, passed on.

My favorite explanation for the church decline we experienced was given by Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens in Vanishing Boundaries, who described active Elders and other lay leaders in the Presbyterian and other mainline churches as “lay liberals,” middle and upper-middle class professionals whose humanist and secular values were stronger than the propositions of traditional faith. They directed their children from confirmation classes into non-church-related colleges and universities, where they chose secular careers. Later, most chose not to attend church. I concluded that the cause of our decline lay with John Calvin and the early Presbyterians who valued education so highly that many of us were educated out of the church. 

I believe that secularization was a good thing. After all, the churches proclaim that God sent Jesus not to condemn the world, but to save it through him. I think of salvation as making whole, or tikkun olam, repair of the broken world, a task given to all of us. A vital church near me teaches to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly (Micah 6:8), a simple vision that stirs the people there. 2001 was the first year that more Americans were unaffiliated with a church than belonged to one. Since then even Presbyterians feed at the new and plentiful smorgasbord of spiritualities, or leave theism entirely. The decline in belonging to church cannot be separated from ceasing to believe old orthodoxies. 

While working for the denomination on issues of professional development, I still assumed the presence of a pastor in almost all congregations. In west central Illinois I saw that this was not so. Congregations without theologically educated pastors may wander into strange beliefs. Only congregations with well-read, articulate lay leaders will be able to provide their communities with the role of ethical and authoritative guidance that pastors once filled. When I was pastor in the ‘70's and ‘80's, I was alarmed that many of my congregants read books by Billy Graham and Oral Roberts, which they received for  contributing to those evangelists’ television shows. The times were changing, but we could not see exactly how or where it would lead. Too many in the church thought I possessed priestly powers, yet our worship services could not compete with the new media.  Today, affluent congregations seek growth with electronic technologies of their own, while the basic causes of church decline remain mostly unaddressed. Churches going their own way may become centers of “Christian nationalism” or various kinds of personal pieties. Theology and Christology as serious fields of study are now on the operating table, awaiting surgery or death.   

As presbytery executive once, and as guest preacher today, I see that most small congregations want to hold on to their past identity, and cannot envision changing.  They will rarely collaborate with other nearby congregations, Presbyterian or otherwise, which might multiply their ministries. On Sunday mornings I used to travel to these towns, stop at the convenience store, and ask where the Presbyterian church was. Rarely did any one even know that a Presbyterian church existed there. My point to the congregations was that they should be known for doing something to benefit the town and its people.

The town without a doctor, lawyer, or minister is in serious decay. Farms have become larger, high tech operations. Many farm families who used to go to church, visit the doctor, and retain the lawyer for business needs have left. The stores that served the farms are gone, and the Walmart in the county seat has everything anyone needs. We are dealing with a cascade of loss.

Fewer church members means less financial support and fewer pastors, which means smaller and fewer seminaries, resulting in fewer jobs for teachers of ministers, and the writers of fewer articles and books of theology and bible interpretation. Large universities close their religion departments from which those teachers would come, because fewer students major in subjects that are no longer in demand. 

The fact that remaining pastors post their sermons online means that anyone in the pastor-less church can read them to their congregations, but then, if members are really interested, they can read them on their own at home, separated from the community. Not many of those sermons will be honest, or teach what needs to be known. Without a pastor there will be no one dedicated to teaching,  resolving conflicts, or organizing church life and missional outreach. However, a “mission and ministry connector” can direct them to good resources and teach lay leaders how to use them. A knowledgeable Ruling Elder from another congregation can serve as the presbytery to others in this way. 

The human desire for meaning in life, and the need to belong in community, will last. How people find ways to satisfy such longings in the future we do not yet know, but the denominational and congregational model we have known will change. I see droplets of hope in some conversations and initiatives in and around the denominations, but what denominations do draws little interest. The creation of new institutions seems unlikely in the near future. Some congregations do grow, usually in more densely populated places, but their experience is individual and anecdotal. 

In retirement I have turned to music and to my relationships with historical Jesus scholars in the Westar Institute. At the end of my memoir, Blue Neon Cross, I wrote, “Who am I to say what small groups of people, unknown to me, now or in some future time, struggling with the teachings of Jesus, might yet become or achieve?” If they sit around a table, and share food and drink (bread and wine?) while studying Jesus, and seeking a more just and inclusive future, I think it is a church.

Hope for a Time of Crisis

A sermon preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church of Scotia, New York, Nov. 26, 2023, edited

From the Hebrew Scriptures: Ecclesiastes 1:1-14 “One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes. All is smoke and steam, vanity, meaningless.”

From the Gospels: Luke 9:57-62  “No one who begins to plow and looks back is fit for God’s Empire.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This sermon is about the hope that we should have that can overcome the fears that we all experience.

I tell you this because I will be taking you on a long and winding road to hope.

You know our fears: We worry about crime.

(I was scammed out of several hundred dollars just a few weeks ago.)

We are grumpy about the economy, inflation, higher prices, 

high interest on houses and cars, shortage of affordable housing.

Depending on your field of work, you are scared about the future of 

        health care, elementary to higher education,  and probably every other endeavor and institution.

I gave you a chemistry illustration today.

The glass with the long neck sitting on the flame is called a “retort,” useful in converting liquid to gases, which can be condensed into new liquids. 

This is the process for the distillation of alcoholic spirits - an interesting use of the word spirit!

A chemistry teacher among us tells me that the retort is drawn incorrectly!

The end of the tube through the stopper into the flask must not be in the liquid being heated, but above it!

Well, this was a meme I copied from Facebook about ten years ago

and now I have learned how to build a still properly.

Here we see fear as a flame, that when applied to ignorance, 

which is not knowing something needful, distills to hate.

We can make more of this concept: If we put hate on the fire of fear we can get violence.

When I used to do conflict management I realized that the source of conflict is change, 

because each of us reacts and responds with different viewpoints to the new situation.

The Teacher of Ecclesiastes is wrong in saying that nothing changes!

So fear plus change produces conflict.

Every change from outside causes problems for some, but maybe opportunities and benefits for others.

Climate change is an example so that attempts to change our past behaviors are resisted.

Every new invention sets many changes into motion: wheels became wagons, chariots, and trains;

trains gave way to cars and airplanes,

         the telegraph became the computer and the cell phone replaced 

         wired phones, cameras, flashlights and a host of other things.

Each new invention delights some people and offends or frightens others.

Electronic developments have brought us robots and Artificial Intelligence,

which brings us back to fear.

Yet change is inevitable. Change cannot be changed.

Change can be either good or bad, but cannot be eliminated from life.

We can’t go back to the way things were.

Jesus said “No one who begins to plough and looks back, is fit for the empire of God.”

(Farmers have explained to me that if you look back your row will become crooked.)

To live in God’s kingdom is to live in the present, 

not tied to the past and looking to the future without fear.

Recently, I have wondered where change itself comes from.

I think it comes from time itself.

[Some people say that the present is God's time.

In other words, God may be the quality of each moment, which just is, without past or future, 

        but always carrying within it our past and the possibilities of all futures.

Jack Caputo in The Folly of God says that God is the "call" itself that draws us into the future.]

As time passes, everything changes, and the basic change for humans is ageing.

As we grow older, we change – in how we understand the world, 

in what we want, in what we have, in what we think.

-------------------

That leads me to some books I have been reading.

I often tell churches that I won’t preach when asked, because, I tell them “I don’t have anything to say.”

Today I am filled with ideas I want to speak about.

Four books from the library on my desk on racism.

I was struck by a comment on the radio 

that before the time roughly of the Reformation in the 1500's, 

there was no racism based on skin color.

How could this be? We cannot imagine this. So I ordered the books from the library.

Somehow before European exploration and colonization, skin color was just “difference.”

But White people were taught to fear people of Color.

This was explained in the musical South Pacific in the song, You Have to Be Carefully Taught.

So if we heat up difference with fear we get racism.

The ways people were divided was by tribe, ethnicity, or religion, 

but primarily whether you were civilized or barbarian.

Often this meant urban or rural, so there is an ancient source 

of the current grievance against cities, the educated, and the wealthy.

-------------------

Another book I read is The Fourth Turning Is Here, by Neil Howe.

He is the guy who with the late William Strauss defined 20 year Generations 

and 80-100 year cycles of social history.

I heard him speak when his first book came out in 1993.

In his scheme there are 4 generations:

I and my sister are Boomers; my older brother is of the “Silent Generation.”

Our parents were the so-called Greatest Generation.

Our grandparents, born after the Civil War are called Missionaries

for all the social developments they began and entering WWI.

My daughters are Generation X, born in the ‘70's.

There are no Millennials in my family, 

so my granddaughter born in 2008 is a “Homelander” or “Gen Z.”

There are many resources for thinking about these things on line.

The book was a shocker to me, even though

I have been preaching a lot the past few years about 

how we now or only recently understand our American history,

and events and issues in our lives in utterly new and different ways

from what we thought we knew or what we were taught when we were younger.

We didn’t know how racist and violent our history was.

We didn’t know that the US was a less than benevolent Empire.

When I was in seminary I was taught that the first chapter of Ecclesiastes was wrong:

First, life isn’t meaningless and history doesn’t go in a circle, they said;

things don’t repeat; history is linear.

They didn't believe in inevitable progress, they said, but the line from past to present to future

        may be bumpy, occasionally stepping backwards into older ways of thinking and behaving,

                but generally moving ahead with progress 

                        so that “the moral arc of the universe bends to justice.”

Now I wonder about that. 

Aren’t there cycles of history like the changes of seasons in the year? 

Isn’t there a circle of life from childhood to early adulthood, 

midlife, and elderhood. (And that last one is getting longer!)

In the church year we have the seriousness of Lent followed by the grief of Good Friday, 

followed by the joy of Easter and its season, and the life of Spirit in the season of Pentecost.

I think we need to reconsider the idea of time and history moving in circles of repetition.

Some things, like winter and old age, are predictable.

In The 4th Turning Is Here we find a repetition of generations 

through a predictable pattern of a spring-like High, 

like the post WWII years when I was growing up,

followed by a summer Awakening, such as occurred during the ‘60's,

followed by an autumnal Unraveling in the ‘80's, ‘90's, and early 2000's, highlighted by 911.

We are now in a Crisis, which Howe says began with the financial upheavel in 2008. 

Howe says that this crisis should peak and be resolved in the next ten years,   

        in a similar way to how WWII followed the Depression, and victory was the end of the crisis.

Today we are living in a crisis and we all know it.

I can’t remember in my lifetime when the daily news was so threatening.

Political division, culture war, people living in different realities, 

some built on conspiracy theories and outright lies.

We see a reversal of civil rights won in previous decades. 

We experience a decline of the churches and other institutions,

great change in technology, economics, and climate, 

with increasing income and wealth gap.

Dictators are being elected in Europe, Israel, and Argentina.

Terrible wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza follow years of terrorism, 

        which actually took many fewer lives.

-----------------

One more thing I have been reading about: Trauma.

My seminary, McCormick in Chicago, announced the formation of a “Trauma Healing Initiative.” 

I said to myself, “What is this?

I had to look up a definition of trauma:

“the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event.”

Individuals suffer trauma from assaults, accidents, fires, and explosions.

We know about trauma through the incidence of PTSD, “post-traumatic stress disorder”

coming out of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

More recently, studies and groups have been formed 

around the ideas of “public trauma” or “shared trauma.”

911 is an example of a public trauma shared by everyone.

(This is why generations are different: Different events mark their childhoods. 

        No one born since 2000 was much affected by or remembers 911.)

 

Imagine the trauma of Israelis Oct. 7, or of Gazans in the weeks since.

We see and hear and read news of terrible injustice, violence and natural disasters. 

At some level each of us shares in these traumas, 

psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, if not physically. 

Because of wartime PTSD experience, there are now treatment procedures in trauma treatment centers.

People recovering from trauma are told not to isolate themselves, 

seek professional help, and join a Support Group.

Many groups are now forming for those of us without physical injury,

but suffering from public and shared trauma.

We all need to listen to our bodies and admit our traumas 

as alcoholics and drug users have to admit their addictions.

All of us need to think about the reality of the possibility of bad things happening to any of us.

We all need to know this and know our strengths for getting through pain and bad times.

We can lessen the effects of the stress, sadness, fear, shame, 

grief, and depression that follow traumatic events before they happen.

Thomas Hubl, author of Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal our Trauma and our World says:

        The avoidance of trauma shows up as an inability to meet life, 

        which is the foremost symptom of separation from others

        and bypassing the spiritual dimension of life.” 

        Too often, we naively seek only 'light and positivity,' 

        and distance ourselves from the pain and grit 

        of our own and others' suffering. 

        By avoiding the raw nakedness of what is real, 

         we miss the deep spiritual intimacy that can only be experienced

        through a willingness to profoundly be in and with the painful dark. 

        Of course, this is much too difficult to do alone. 

        When we come together, willing to receive one another's pain  without judgment, 

                 without turning away, we discover trust, connection, and healing release. 

As Christians, we should know these things:

The cross of Jesus shows the reality of violence and trauma in human life.

We can look forward without fear if we recall from our past 

that our ancestors survived and responded to the crises of their lives

in the depression, in WWII and in WWI before it.

As individuals, they lived through, suffered, or died in the Civil War, 

        and the War for Independence before that.

Terrible things have happened before and will happen again.

It may be that the next terrible, national crisis will bring people together again, 

and churches will once again be centers for social and personal healing, 

and for the basic expressions of gratitude, service to others, and democracy.

Neil Howe tells us that each generation is favored by certain traits and characteristics.

Some are heros, nomads, artists, and prophets.

He would say that I am living out my life as a senior prophet, fitting for a boomer in this time. 

If you are of Generation X and the Millennial and Homeland generations 

each of you has your own views of life  because of the worlds you experienced growing up.

In many ways we gave you a bad deal, but you learned different skills from mine;

        and your abilities will serve all of us well as the coming crisis reaches its depths and heights.

Younger generations give me hope.

Children and grandchildren have always brought hope and new life, and new beginnings to the world.

We can only regret that we aren’t leaving them a better one.

And we musn’t retreat from or give up on this world. 

Stay engaged.

Everyday I read an obituary for someone in their 90's

who recently completed a book or a painting or who led a movement.

That means I might have a decade more, and you may have even more years

in which to accomplish something great.

May it be so.

The Road to a New Christianity

(Preached April 14 at First Reformed of Wynantskill NY, and May 14 at Trinity Presbyterian in Scotia NY. The texts were Micah 6:1-8 and the core of the Sermon on the Mount, by the Jesus Seminar.) 

On Easter Sunday I was a little sad because April 9 was also the anniversary 

of the execution by the Nazis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1945, 

only a few days before the end of WWII.

He was imprisoned and hanged for participating in a plot to kill Hitler.

Nearly 5,000 people were executed for the plot.

You may have seen one or more of several TV specials and full length films about him 

        in recent years, such as the film, Valkyrie.

He may have died, but he is risen!

There has been a kind of resurrection of Bonhoeffer that he never could have imagined.

Now there is an international Bonhoeffer society

with national divisions in dozens of countries, of many scholars 

who do little more than study and write about him,

He is one of the most extensively studied and written-about figures in modern Christian history.

So, I and many other ministers are Bonhoeffer nerds.

Why so much interest in a single Lutheran clergyman in Germany, 

who was swept up and killed among more than 6 million others?

To start with, he wrote some remarkable books, mostly short, 

and not scholarly but aimed at church members like yourselves.

The first one to be published in the US came out four years after his death.

You may have read The Cost of Discipleship in a church study group.

It was written before the World War, and is about the Sermon on the Mount 

and how following Jesus' teachings faithfully, 

we witness to him and belong to him, 

and come into a deeper, more personal relationship with God.

This book is best known because here Bonhoeffer wrote of "Cheap grace,"

expecting God's presence and help, but without the teachings of Jesus,

without the cross, without discipleship.

Many people in the churches didn't know about this book until another,

more sensational and controversial book came out in 1963: 

Honest to God, by British bishop, James A.T. Robinson.

I am sure that many mainstream pastors preached from these writings, 

at that time, and from the writings of Bultmann and Tillich, 

who also were discussed in Honest to God.

If you are old enough you probably heard one or more of such sermons, but not so much anymore.

Honest to God introduced Britain and the U.S. to Bonhoeffer's writings

in Letters and Papers from Prison, his thoughts from 1942-1945.

Here is my $1.45 copy from 1967, and this monster from 2010 which sells for as much as $50

with additional material and commentary, Vol 8 of 10 books in the DB Works.

This is the book that concerns me today.

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Who was this person? And why is he important to us, today?

He was from an upper class family in Berlin.

His father was a psychiatrist, his mother a teacher.

His Grandparents and uncles were professors of theology and church history,

but Dietrich's family was not religious, or church going, 

and yet he became a serious, pious teacher and preacher 

who believed that we must follow the words of Jesus 

which were to him the Word of God.

Bonhoeffer almost always spoke of Jesus as "Christ," whereas

I always speak of the historical Jesus as "Jesus" 

and talk about him post resurrection as "the Christ."

He spent a year at Union Seminary and in Harlem in New York City, 

which affected him profoundly, but returned to Germany

to work against the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

What he wrote in prison sounds current today, 

and has provided the sparks for all the radical theology of the 1960's and of today.

I will give only of a few of his ideas that impact all of us today.

Some of his thoughts and mine may be shocking to you.

(I am trying not to give a lecture, but what I think of as a teaching sermon!)

Bonhoeffer wrote in prison: [043044]

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question [of] what Christianity really is, 

or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. 

The time when people could be told everything by means of words,

whether theological or pious, is over.... 

We are moving toward a completely religionless time; 

people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. 

Even those who honestly describe themselves as 'religious' do not in the least act up to it, 

        and so they presumably mean something quite different by 'religious.'"

Bonhoeffer was first of all despairing of how the Christian churches of Germany could accept Hitler 

and control of the churches by the Nazis and the murder of millions of Jews and others.

This was so serious that he came to realize that the churches and their doctrines 

        were at fault and needed to change.

He began to think about how Christian beliefs about God were outdated and mistaken.

He said: 

"The foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our 'Christianity....' 

What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? 

How do we speak of God--without religion, i.e., without the culture and philosophy of the times. 

How do we speak... in a "secular" way about God?"

Bonhoeffer saw a great problem for us:

"It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world....

What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world...."

[All these] doctrines of revelation: virgin birth, Trinity, – [aren't] biblical.... 

[But] The mysteries of the Christian faith must be protected." 

So Bonhoeffer planned a book on "Taking stock of Christianity"

and "The Real Meaning of the Christian Faith."

First, was this problem of God. [060844]

"[People] have learned to deal with themselves in all questions of importance 

without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called 'God.' 

In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become 

an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. 

But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; 

it is becoming evident that everything gets along without 'God'  – and, in fact, just as well as before. 

As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, 

        'God' is being pushed more and more out of life, 

        losing more and more ground. We have 'come of age.'"

So, what people now believe is in a 'God of the gaps,' a God who is absent

except when we need him to step in and help us.

But this God doesn't step in; this God really does not exist.

I think that people saw this after 9-11, 

        that the Providential God who takes care of us isn't around anymore.

Bohoeffer said:  [071644]

"We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world as if there were no God. 

And this is just what we do recognize--before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. 

So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. 

God would have us know that we must live as people who manage our lives without him. 

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34).... 

The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God, 

is the God before whom we stand continually. 

Before God and with God we live without God. 

God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. 

He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way,

the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. 

Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering."

Bonhoeffer saw that Much of our Christian faith has been a flight 

from the world to God, an escape for our individual salvation.

Bonhoeffer asked: 050544

"Does the question about saving one's soul appear in the Old Testament at all?"

The entire Hebrew scriptures are about  the need 

        for personal responsibility to others and for justice in society.

Sin in Hebrew scriptures is failure to be just; and Jesus was a good Jew.

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For Bonhoeffer, the proof that God was in Jesus is that [081044]

"Jesus is there only for others." Jesus is "the man for others."

"His 'being there for others' is the experience of transcendence

[of going beyond the normal; of God's reality and presence]. 

It is only this 'being there for others,' maintained till death, 

        that is the ground of his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. 

Faith is participation in this being [for others] of Jesus.... 

Our relation to God is not a "religious" relationship to the highest, 

most powerful, and best Being imaginable – that is not authentic transcendence – 

        but our relation to God is a new life in "existence for others,"

        through participation in the being of Jesus [for others]. 

The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable, 

but the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation..."

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So where does that leave us today?

Bonhoeffer wrote about his time something that sounds like our own: [072144]

"Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-preservation, 

                        as though that were an end in itself,

is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. 

Our... being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and work for justice."

Prayer for Bonhoeffer was mostly a private affair, 

in which we seek to align ourselves with God and Christ.

Prayer is not to make us feel better, but to lead us to action in the world.

Bonhoeffer had harsh prescriptions for our churches:

"The church must come out of its stagnation.  [080344] 

We must move out again into the open air of intellectual discussion with the world, 

and risk saying controversial things, if we are to get down to the serious problems of life.

The church is the church only when it exists for others. 

To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. 

Furthermore: [There is] the question of revising the creeds including the Apostles’ Creed; [and]

reform of the training for the ministry and the pattern of clerical life."

------------

So if we want to think today about the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ,

we need to think of resurrection as a symbol for the possibilities 

of our transformation into new life.

Bonhoeffer called the new life, the new creation in a resurrected life, faith!

So, to believe is to live the new life, and to allow Jesus to lead us into the world, not away from it.

This is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pious upper class Lutheran and pacifist,

came to participate in a plot to kill a murderous tyrant.

He saw it as something that had to be done in order to be faithful to God in Christ.

Whether he was right or not is still debated:

We cannot know if killing Hitler would have brought the positive outcome

        the resisters hoped for or expected. 

Sometimes when we act to change things for the better, they become worse.

We call that "unintended consequences."

---------------

To summarize: 

* The point of being Christian is to be a disciple, and that is hard.

* We live in a religionless time because we have come of age in our knowledge of the world. 

* God is being pushed out of life; and we rely on a god of the gaps.

* We see faith as escape from the world, but Jesus was the man for others, for the world. 

* Faith is our participation in this being for others.

* Faith requires Prayer and righteous action - work for justice - in the world.

* Discipleship is responsible action in faith.

* The church must exist for others; we need to revise our creeds and our worship.

I see Bonhoeffer travelling in a great circle in his thought about Jesus.

Bonhoeffer began with deep faith in the Incarnation, belief that God was in Jesus, the Christ.

As he focused more and more on the crucifixion, he realized that 

        God exists only in the suffering of Christ and in the lives and deaths of all who suffer.

And if God is in human suffering, as he was in Jesus' suffering, then God is incarnate in all of us.

So, if we wish to know God, we must be alive to the suffering around us and in the world.

We must therefore treat everyone as Christ, as God,

even if Christ and God are not clearly visible in them.

But at the same time, we must do justice and promote justice 

and resist the evil that causes suffering.

-----------

Bonhoeffer is back! He too is risen.

Bonhoeffer challenges us to reform our expression and practice of Christianity 

into something more true and honest for today.

What will we do about that, and when?

A Sermon on Rats and CRT

Scripture: Philemon, Luke 14:25-33

ENTRY
In August we were selling our house and our family spent a wonderful week 
on a lake deep in the Adirondacks.
On the last day a real estate agent called to tell us 
that a Man had entered our home while we were away.
We were frightened.

We spoke with the state police and learned that it was a young man 
I will call Jesse who lives around the corner - 
We were told that he has used and sold drugs since elementary school.
His parents threw him out of their home because he was using meth.
He looks for empty houses like ours was and enters; well known to police.
He doesn't know what's going on; out of touch with reality.

The Police sent Jesse to a mental health facility, but he was soon released.
Jesse returned, entered our porch, left his bag of clothes.
Again we were afraid. I installed a new lockset on the porch door.

Local police said they can arrest him but he will be out on the street again.
They implied that New York's "bail reform" prevented judges from keeping him in jail. 
I have thought about this and do not see this as the true problem.
Bail reform prevents those accused of non-violent crimes 
from incarceration for long periods awaiting trial.
We wanted him to get help, but the deep problem is that our towns 
don't have the needed resources that might help someone like Jesse.
I needed to understand more about meth.

METH
Methamphetamine releases high levels of dopamine in the brain
making the user want more of it.
Meth use alters judgment and decision-making 
leading to risky behaviors because it interferes 
with thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering.
Long-term methamphetamine use leads to 
extreme weight loss, severe dental problems, intense itching leading to skin sores, 

            anxiety, confusion, memory loss, sleep problems, and sometimes violent behavior.

ADDICTION
When we encountered Jesse and the police, 
I stumbled on an article by Johann Hari about morphine addiction, 
and about something called "rat park" and "rat heaven."
The article described an experiment was done in the '60s 
with a rat in a cage, given two water bottles. 
One was just water, and one was water laced with morphine. 
The rat would almost always prefer the drugged water, 
and almost always kill itself very quickly, within a couple of weeks. 

Other experimenters in the ‘70s said, “Well, wait a minute. 
We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. 
Let’s try this a little bit differently.” 
So they built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. 
Everything your rat could want: Great food. It’s got loads of other rats for fun and sex.
And they’ve got both the water bottles, one regular and one drugged. 
But in Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. 
They hardly use any of it. 
None of them ever overdose. 
None of them ever use it in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. 

CAGES
So the experimenters concluded that something was wrong 
with our ideas about addiction. 
It’s not a moral failing as conservatives argued, 
and the drug doesn't take over your brain as liberals said. 
Addiction is about your cage. 

Addiction is an adaptation we make in response to our environment. 
It's the environment in which we live, specifically the systems we create 
which lead us to want and do certain things.
It's where we live and the conditions in which we live.

To think about addiction in humans and not rats,
we can see that we have created a society 
where significant numbers of our fellow citizens 
cannot bear to live their lives without being drugged. 
We’ve created a world in which individuals are on their own, 
isolated from each other, rather than engaged in social interactions.
More of us live alone than ever before, and too many of us

        binge eat chips and cookies and candy, or drink alcohol,
and binge watch Netflix and other TV outlets.
Too many of us are more like the rat in the first cage with limited choices, 
than like the bonded, connected rats 
in the cages that fulfill our social needs. 

So, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. 
The opposite of addiction is connection. 
Our whole society, is geared towards making us connect with things
when what we need is to be more connected with people. 

This is a reason AA works; it connects people.
Here I was, reading about rats and cages, and I found the scripture for today, 
that includes Paul's letter to Philemon, about a slave he met in prison.

In first century Palestine 10-15% of the population were slaves 
and Slavery was considered normal.
Because the rich had slaves, most people who were not slaves 
had little access to employment, 
and were pushed into crushing poverty.
The SYSTEM of slavery caused poverty for everyone else (except the 1%).
These were the people Jesus came from, lived with, and taught.

Paul was much better off, but was jailed for preaching, 
which was "rabble rousing" to the Romans, 
inciting people to "foreign and subversive" ideas and customs.
Paul was jailed more than once, and once for two years, 
where he met Onesimus, a household slave, 
owned by a wealthy Jesus follower.
Slavery to Onesimus was like living in a cage, 
and he may have run away several times to be free.

Most of us cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to be a slave, 
but there are those among us who can.
Most Black Americans come from families with history in slavery.
Even when slavery as an institution was ended, 
the essence of slavery did not end.

One of my favorite singers is Nina Simone, 
made a Civil Rights song famous, 
"I wish I knew how it would feel to be free."
Little is known of the lyricist, Dick Dallas, there isn't even a picture of him. 
He wrote and she sang:
I wish I could break all the chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things I should say
Say 'em loud, say 'em clear For the whole round world to hear.

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart.
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree That every one should be free.

I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish I could do all the things I can do

Though I'm way overdue, I'd be starting anew
I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly

Oh, I'd soar to the sun and look down at the sea

And then I'd sing 'cause I'd know how it feels to be free....

CRITICAL THEORIES

When I learned about the Rat Park experiment,
I thought "Hey, this is CRITICAL ADDICTION THEORY."
That would describe how the experimenters looked deeply 
into the nature of addiction, learned new ways of seeing, 
thinking about, and understanding what causes addiction, 
how people become addicted, and how addiction behaviors can be changed.

Of course my labeling of this addiction problem echoes something in the news the past year:
CRITICAL RACE THEORY, which few people understand clearly. 
Basically, some lawyers wondered why all the new Civil Rights laws
in the 60's had so little effect on American society, specifically 

        why desegregating schools led Whites to withdraw their children 

from public schools and enroll them in private academies, 
leaving Black children in underfunded schools like where they began. 
This explained why Blacks continue to experience much of life in America as a kind of cage.

Our problem first of all is that we misunderstand the words "CRITIC" and "CRITICAL."
We commonly use those words to mean "making judgments," 
saying that something is wrong, and then blaming someone for it.
Ironically, that is what is being done to studies such as CRT
when CRT is blamed for imagined reverse racism.
Partly because of these attacks on CRT, there are now only 11 states 

        that do NOT restrict teaching about race in some way. 

But another meaning of "critical" is "to analyze and to think deeply about"
an issue or problem in order to uncover solutions to problems 
and deeper understandings of life.
Interestingly, in the churches about 150 years ago we had a similar issue 

                called "HIGHER CRITICISM" OF THE BIBLE" 

        which arose when scholars asked questions like:
    "Why are there two creation stories and different names for God in the Hebrew scriptures?"
    "Why are the first 3 gospels so similar to each other and so different from the 4th?'
Such Bible studies caused great anxiety among Christians 
who had been taught that the Bible was somehow perfect as it was
         and didn't need to be interpreted,
when actually the churches had kept the Bible in a cage 
                which prevented it from telling us the fullness of what was there.

And about the same time as I read about addiction, 
I read an article about how feminist writers are asking 
"Why is it that after 50 years of the struggle 
for women's equality, so little has been achieved?"
They described the cages women inhabit, but didn't use the phrase or name.
But I thought immediately, "This is CRITICAL FEMINIST THEORY."

This week (8-26) David Brooks in the NYTimes wrote about 
"Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be," and the answer is
that the internet and our phones have become cages for us.
Brooks did not label it "CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY" but I do.

We don't think we have slavery any more, 
but we are slaves to our old habits, our prejudices, and our phones, 
and any addiction that afflicts us.
We are prisoners no less than Onesimus, we are in cages no less than lab rats.
There are systems of law, banking, property taxes, technology, and education,
and probably some government and private systems I can't think of.
But we can list the institutions; the elements of society, 
that used to connect us with each other:
Schools, churches, clubs and organizations, performance places, 
and dare I say it? Bowling alleys (now "family entertainment centers") and pool halls. 
Many of these are shrinking or have disappeared,

        but there will always be bars and pubs.

We in the churches are on the front lines of the terrible disruptions of our times, 
which have separated us, driven us apart, and devastated these institutions.
I have few solutions to the problems of the churches, 
but we must know more about all of these things and think on these things
so that we can work ourselves out of these social problems.
We need to be critics in the best sense of the word
to see more clearly and understand more deeply what is wrong, 
and find the clues and the possible changes that we can implement 
that will bring us out of our separations.

We are gathered today, in social meeting with each other, 
in the formal ritual act we call "communion," 
        to celebrate the many ways Jesus sets us free, 
                to be more profoundly connected, and therefore more human.
This makes us, in a sense, "prisoners for Christ," as Paul described himself,
perhaps more able to give up all our possessions, as Jesus urges us in Luke,
because they imprison us. May it be so.

A Press Release -- Blue Neon Cross: More Than a Memoir

More Than a Memoir – Blue Neon Cross: 

                A Personal History of the Church in the Modern World

by Dennis L Maher, Dmin

Dennis Maher is a retired Presbyterian minister and church executive. 

The blue neon cross that glowed from above and behind the pulpit in the author’s childhood church in Sioux City, Iowa, left a lasting impression on him, becoming a metaphor for the church in the modern world.

The modern design of the ancient means of torture and death framed his quest for spiritual and cultural understanding. 

Deciding as a youth that the church had nothing to offer him, he describes the death of a friend, engagement to the friend's sister, and his decision to follow Jesus.

During the '60s racial justice and peace in Vietnam became his personal issues.

He taught school in Chicago, but his search for how to be a Christian in the world led him to enter McCormick Seminary. In so doing, he discovered that becoming part of the leadership of the church removed him from the world. 

He led congregations in Minnesota, and while serving a pastorate in New Jersey, the author earned a Doctor of Ministry in transforming organizations. 

He raised money for new churches and social justice programs in Chicago, led professional development within the Presbyterian Church USA in Louisville, and became a regional church executive in Peoria. 

Then he left to be Assistant Director of the Jesus Seminar in northern California. 

Reflecting on the theology of Paul Tillich and the thinking of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and others, he came to understand that the Spirit is what transpires between and among us, and that together we create the highest human values.

Maher now believes that God is the calling we experience to live according to the values of love and Justice.

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Published May 27, 2022.  Available at amazon.com.

Contact: Dennis Maher – reverendsax@gmail.com

Blue Neon Cross: A Summary and First Reviews

Why a "Blue Neon Cross?"

A cross was the Roman means of execution, but neon screams commercialism and suggests Las Vegas. So a neon cross represents the church in the modern world. Blue reminded the Presbyterian Scots of sky and heaven. 

The author became a Christian in Iowa City, a Presbyterian minister in Chicago, a pastor in Minnesota and New Jersey, led Professional Development for the PCUSA in Louisville, and was a church executive in Chicago and Peoria. 

He left to be Assistant Director of the Jesus Seminar. 

Along the way he tackled theology and spirituality, peacemaking and community organizing, saxophone and clarinet. Through remembrances and reflections, he tells how he concluded that Jesus was a Wisdom Teacher, Spirit is what transpires between and among us, and Love and Justice are God.

Readers say good things about this book:

A Presbyterian Leader: "A close up view of the decline of mainline Protestantism. Dennis has a lot of great stories to tell us. He can teach us about a few of our denominations' victories and even more about our colossal failures. I can safely say that Denny is responsible for many of the former and none of the later. A tale well told, Maher's account is honest, gutsy and accurate. It explains why most of the people in your town aren't active in the churches that their parents and grandparents founded."

A Jewish Marriage and Family Therapist: "I’m into Dennis’ book, Blue Neon Cross, and it is REALLY excellent. Beautifully written, engaging, smart, with lovely textured memory snapshots from all of the scenes of his life. I’m incredibly impressed with the detail of his memory. He artfully explores the influences of his intellectual and emotional life and their synergies. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone discuss the cross influences of their intellectual and emotional lives so engagingly. He wisely explores the spiritual, sociological, historical, economic, and interpersonal, facets of his experience, and discusses many of the current events that also influenced my life. VERY impressed! Highly recommend!!"

Pastor Colleagues: "...polished, personal, insightful, complete."

                "Your writing style is very easy to read. I find it compelling."

Life-long Friends:       "I can't believe you did all those things! Well written!"

                "You are a good story-teller."

My First Editor: "What a personal, intellectual and theological journey! Your honesty, insight, perspective, erudition and recall are astounding, Denny. It's a whole new book (or I just have a bad memory)! I really enjoyed it and am glad you stuck with it, reformulating it and raising it above a travelogue into the realm of literature. What a summation, what an investigation, what a consummation! Yum!"

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