Our President said on August 5, 2004, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” [Laughter.] Did I hear an Amen out there?
But this isn’t really a political sermon; it’s a sermon about faith. It’s about the nation in which we find ourselves, as I described in a sermon delivered exactly two years ago, entitled “Red Jesus, Blue Jesus.” Well, you may have picked that up from the title (which I think Bill was a little unsure about when he put it out there on the street), “Purple Jesus.” I got that title, really, because like Garrison Keillor I am a great fan of third-grade humor--there’s an old joke that third-graders tell, which is “What happens when the red pirates crash into the blue pirates?” The answer, “They’re marooned.”
We need to ask ourselves what happens in America. In the two years since I preached that sermon, what has happened to Red Jesus/Blue Jesus, this sort of widening religious divide in American life? What has happened in those two years? The answer is that we have come together in some surprising and powerful ways. In fact, I want to talk about it in very specific ways, about very brave, and lonely, and controversial evangelical thinkers, whose books you’re not going to find in a typical Borders or Barnes and Noble. You have to go to evangelical bookstores to find them, and I have. This sermon was born one evening when I was visiting Paul. He had gone out to a party, and I was tired of writing, and so I turned on Charlie Rose.
There were two evangelical ministers being interviewed. One was a young man who has a large megachurch, named Gregory Boyd. He had just been written up on the New York Times front page, because he had preached a series of sermons, entitled “The Myth of a Christian Nation,” that had so offended his evangelical congregation that more than a thousand members of his congregation resigned. How many ministers are brave enough to do that? A thousand members resigning! Amazing. The other was Rick Warren, who you probably have heard about, because he is the author of The Purpose-Driven Life. He’s an amazing guy. Rosemary and I went to hear him speak once at the Kennedy School of Government. He preaches in Hawaiian shirts; he gives away all the money that he got from that mega-best-selling book; and though he is not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination, he says it is time for us to stop complaining so much about the culture in which we find ourselves, and start doing something about it. His work in Africa, specifically with AIDS, quite frankly is something that we Unitarian Universalists need to emulate. His one church is probably doing as much as we are. He’s an amazing guy, and I admire him a lot. I don’t agree with his theology, but he is a good man.
The two of them were sitting there, and they were describing a longing for civility in our common religious life, a sense that it’s time to stop name-calling, that it’s time to somehow build bridges, and for liberals and conservatives and moderates to start talking to each other. Bob Edgar, who is head of the National Council of Churches, talks about a reassertion of the middle church/middle mosque/middle temple, of the vast common ground. It’s time we started talking to each other, and these brave evangelicals are pointing the way. And you know, I think it’s kind of good to sit here from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit in the bluest of blue states, and give praise where praise is due. In the end, when Pat Robertson says,
You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists. Nonsense! I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.
if he’s saying that about fellow Christians, imagine what he might be saying about Unitarian Universalists!
But there’s an antidote to such poisonous thought, and it’s coming from people like Gregory Boyd. In his four sermons that he gave to his congregations—and I’m sure they felt like they were getting a hammer-blow to the head, and certainly to the heart—he talked about what he called the myth of a Christian nation. He’s a very brave man, because the sermon actually began when he was attending, right before the invasion of Kuwait, a July 4th worship service in a megachurch in his denomination. He writes:
At center stage stood a large cross next to an equally large American flag. The congregation sang ... “God Bless America.” The climax of the service centered on a video of a well-known Christian military general giving a patriotic speech about how God has blessed America as evidenced by the speedy and almost “casualty-free” victory “he gave us” in the Gulf War….
The video closed with a scene of a silhouette of three crosses on a hill with an American flag waving in the background. Majestic, patriotic music now thundered. Suddenly, four fighter jets appeared on the horizon, flew over the crosses, and then split apart. As they roared over the camera, the words “God Bless America” appeared on the screen in front of the crosses.
The congregation responded with roaring applause, catcalls, and a standing ovation. I saw several people wiping tears from their eyes. Indeed, as I remained frozen in my seat, I grew teary-eyed as well—but for entirely different reasons. I was struck with horrified grief. Thoughts raced through my mind: How could the cross and the sword have been so thoroughly fused without anyone seeming to notice? How could Jesus’ self-sacrificial death be linked with flying killing machines? How could the kingdom of God be reduced to this sort of violent, nationalistic tribalism? Has the church progressed at all since the Crusades?
And so he addressed his fellow evangelicals. He said all of us talk about taking America back for God, but America never really belonged to God—not even in our origins, he reminded us. People really didn’t want to hear it, but he kept reminding us that in the origins and the construction of America as a nation, it never looked remotely like Jesus. There was nothing distinctively Christ-like about the way that America was discovered, or conquered, or governed. The fact that it was largely done under the banner of Christ, he says, doesn’t make it more Christian, any more than other bloody conquests done in Jesus’s name throughout history. He calls what his fellow evangelicals sometimes salute a civil or American folk religion. It actually is not Biblical at all. It is a way of reinforcing things that we choose and want to believe about ourselves: that we are the forces of light; that if we are opposing evildoers, then by consequence we must be God’s chosen. And he says, is this any different from the Taliban?
Do people wish to hear this? These are very hard words; and the answer is that some do, and some don’t; but in the end, he refused to make his pulpit into a banner of nationalistic fervor, and there are other evangelicals standing up and doing the same. I couldn’t have given this sermon two years ago, and I’m very glad that I can today.
Of course, the leader in this movement is probably Jim Wallis, with whom Rosemary took a class at Harvard. He has been editing Sojourners magazine for a long, long time, so he’s been in the trenches; he’s been advocating these ideas for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that people like us took notice with his book called God’s Politics. Yes, he definitely condemns his evangelical fellow brethren, but he also is not particularly enamored by us on the other side of the blue-Jesus line, if you will. He subtitled his book Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It. He’s trying to build bridges; he’s trying to remind people that if you claim to take the New Testament literally, word by word, then why do you ignore everything Jesus said about poverty? Why do you ignore Jesus talking about peace? It may be literal, but it’s highly selective; it’s Reader’s Digest at the ultimate. He remembers once having lunch with a non-profit housing provider for the poor, who is a fellow evangelical, and he said, you know, I don’t get it. When I go to church, all I hear about is America being blessed, and how it’s important to make sure that the wealthy continue to get wealthy. This isn’t my understanding of the Christianity that I grew up with, the Christianity that I believe in. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,” and opened his own ministry by saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has asked me to bring good news to the poor.” That’s how it starts. Jesus talks about the poor, and the role of wealth in our lives, more than two hundred times in the New Testament. If you’re going to take the Bible literally, take that literally.
George Hunter wrote a book that caused a huge crisis within the evangelical movement, entitled Christian Evangelical, and … Democrat?, because he was tired of his movement, his people, the tradition he loved and had given his whole life to, being essentially manipulated and absorbed into a political party. He talks about oxymorons, and I love his list: business ethics, Microsoft Works (I love that one), instant classic, cold as Hell, devout atheist (maybe he does know something about us), military intelligence, peace force; but he says the most powerful oxymoron out there might be “evangelical Democrat.” He himself is not a liberal. He is not pro-choice. He would prefer that there not be gay marriages. He’s unabashed and clear; he doesn’t necessarily share our agenda; he’s not a proto-liberal; he’s not a Unitarian Universalist in the making. He’s a four-square evangelical. But he says, “I tried to take the message that I understood that Jesus was making, and treat it seriously; and if I do that, then I have to pay attention to who’s taking care of the poor, who advocates for the poor, who cares about the poor.” And therefore he says to his fellow evangelicals, don’t sign the party line; be a patriot, keep your mind open, listen to both sides, build bridges, pay attention to what’s really happening.
There are others, as well, and what are they working against? It is said that Kansas may be the most conservative place in America. Some of you have probably read Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas. Well, I’ll tell you what’s the matter with Kansas. This is a prayer that I received over the Internet, in a well-intentioned E-mail, and I’ve been saving it up for today. It was given to the Kansas state legislature.
Heavenly Father, we come before You to ask Your forgiveness; we seek Your direction and your guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘’Woe to those who call evil good,’’ but that’s exactly what we have done. We have lost our Spiritual equilibrium; we have inverted our values. We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word in the name of moral pluralism; we have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism; we have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle …. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare; and in the name of choice we have killed our unborn We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem; we have abused power and called it political savvy; we have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it taxes; we have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression .... Search us, O God, and know our hearts today; bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of the state of Kansas; grant them Your wisdom to rule, as we continue our prayer; and as we go in out of the fog, give us clear minds to accomplish our goals, for we pray in Jesus’s name. Amen.
This is a fairly good (and I think accurate) depiction of a world-view that is so alien and so different from ours. There are divisions between red-state and blue-state psychology, but there is also an increasing hunger in all states, in all places and across the board, even if we go into conservative evangelical churches, there is a hunger to break out of this closed mind-set. Jerry Falwell said:
You’ve got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I’m for the President to chase them all over the world. If it takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord.
We don’t blow anyone away in the name of the Lord. That is a blasphemy. For a Unitarian to talk about blasphemy is pretty good, but that is a blasphemy against everything I think I understand about the nature of Jesus.
In the end, there is this hunger to break down these artificial boundaries and borders between us. We have sincere and real differences, but we can talk about them; we can debate them; we can pray over them; and in the end we don’t need a red America and a blue America. We need to be able to able to talk. We need a purple America. In the end, it is so important that we somehow find ways to reach across the divide, and this is just as true for us in our liberal tradition as it is for them. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said, “When Jesus said to love our enemies, I don’t think he meant to kill them.” Somehow, we have to find a way to tap in, and not just into the spirit of peace, to say we’re peace-lovers. We have to act like we want peace, and that means to pay attention to these lonely and controversial figures who speak out of their tradition in such powerful ways, and to salute them, and to try to speak, when we can, across the borders.
Billy Graham once said, “I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between religious fundamentalists and the political right.” It should. And the political left has no monopoly on ultimate truth, either. We are both human. We are both incomplete. We have something to offer each other in our conversation, if we want to make Jonathan Swift’s words not be true. He said we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not quite enough to make us love. Those are very powerful words. And in the end, this hasn’t really been a sermon about evangelicals; it’s been a sermon about us. What ways can we cut through? What ways can we confront and become the best Unitarian Universalists we can be? How can we pay attention to a tradition that is at the heart of our faith? “I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me; I was naked and you gave me clothing; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.”
Let us be as brave as these embattled evangelicals. There is great common ground, even though we do not recognize Jesus as the son of God. We may not take the New Testament literally, but we can take this message seriously. And if anyone wishes to start being literal about the Bible, I think we can work with people who say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God. Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the world.” I would like to live in a world like that. Let’s take literally the admonition to feed the hungry, and that old-time favorite, “Thou shalt not kill.” We won’t become Christians, any more than these evangelicals will become Unitarians; but what a wonderful promise lies before us, if we can but take our faith seriously enough to embrace the soul of our liberal tradition.
Amen
