Roger Ray, pastor
January 9,2011
Isaiah 42:1-9
Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. 2 He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; 3 a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. 4 He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. 5 Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: 6 I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, 7 to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. 8 I am the Lord, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. 9 See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.
Acts 10:34-42
34 Then Peter began to speak to them: 'I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. 36You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. 37That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; 40but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.'One of the people who started what we now call the Progressive Christian movement was a Baptist preacher in New York over a hundred years ago. Walter Rauschenbusch, who was obviously of German descent, but more importantly he was a part of a very pious Christian family of excellent scholars.
As his studies led him into the higher criticism of the Bible, he slowly and with a lot of resistance, began to accept that what he had been taught to believe about the inerrancy of scripture and certain literal interpretations of biblical accounts was just wrong. And once you tear away that mythology, that superstition, and you begin to hear the message of Jesus coming through the centuries, you begin to realize that Jesus was a teacher of a kind of radical compassion.
Rauschenbusch decided then to accept a job as the pastor of a congregation in that part of New York that was already called "Hell's Kitchen." And it was there in that turn of the 20th century Baptist Church that the social gospel movement was born as Rauschenbusch realized that things like abusive land lords and poverty level salaries were, in fact, matters of upmost spiritual concern.
Those of us who have received a seminary education in the past fifty or sixty years are all pretty familiar with Walter Rauschenbusch's story but mostly you only hear him referenced now and then.... Possibly because his name is so hard to pronounce but more likely because his work set off a series of great spiritual leaders who eclipsed him in so many ways that we tend to focus more on his successors than we do on him.
I mention him today, both with respect for his important work and because of something that so many people know about.... And that is his sister. One of my professors at Harvard made a passing reference in one of his lectures to Rauschenbusch's conflict with his sister Emma and that thread turned out to be much more interesting that rehashing Walter's work in Hell's Kitchen.
I would hesitate to say it just this way anywhere but here, but one of the most ridiculous absurdities in Baptist tradition has been their insistence that only a man can be a preaching pastor unless, of course, a woman decides to be a preaching pastor on the mission field and, evidently, once off of American soil, gender no longer matters. This massively stupid policy resulted in the export of some of America's most highly motivated spiritual leaders to the four corners of the earth.
Almost everywhere that they were successful, male leadership would swoop in and take over and, in almost every case, manage to screw things up enough to bring the female founded congregations to an end. That's just for free ladies, my actual interest in Emma is along a different line of conversation.
Emma went to India where, it was her intention, to tell the Hindus about Jesus and turn them into Baptists.... Which she did for a number of years. But her heart was changed by her exposure to Indian culture, something which happens very often in the case of missionaries to go to distant lands to tell them how wrong they are about their religion..... once they get there, once they get to know the people and to understand their faith and the insights of Buddhism, or Hinduism or Islam.... Emma, like so many other missionaries, found herself becoming more sympathetic with her Hindu neighbors and less enamored with the faith of her rigid father and her surprisingly conservative brother.
Walter was able to see that conservative Baptist teachings had obscured the teachings of Jesus but he had no sympathy with those who went off dabbling in other religions.... Such as, for example, his sister, Emma.
Her awareness of the ethical implications of the Christian faith led her to lean heavily on reforming the cast system of India but what she discovered there was a surprisingly liberated view of women which made her look back across the ocean at her brother's insistence that his wife keep a quite presence in their home with considerable disdain. Walter was shocked at how becoming a missionary had turned his sister into a feminist...... as masters are often shocked to discover that once freed, their slaves were not really happy being slaves.
When Walter Rauschenbusch moved into Hell's Kitchen and got to know the poor immigrants who lived there, he was able to identify with them, have compassion for them and to see that it was his Christian duty to help them both directly and by changing the structure of the economy that continually victimized them. He was not equally able to see that his wife and his sister were every bit as fully human as the poor immigrants he learned to love.
Emma, identified with the Hindus of India, and similarly made dramatic breakthroughs in setting aside her learned prejudices and, in time, she realized that her famous and well-celebrated brother was something of a blockhead.
I mention this matter of the famous Rauschenbusch family conflict in reflection on our reading from Acts this morning which tells us about a dawning awareness on the part of Peter, the apostle, that the gentiles whom he had always been taught to believe were inferior or at least that they were so very different from Jews that they could not possibly be considered as prospective followers of Jesus.
I had Jeremiah do an awful lot of scripture reading this morning but the only sentence which I really want you to focus on is in the very first verse of our reading from Acts. Peter says what Walter Rauschenbusch was later able to say about poor immigrants and what Emma Rauschenbusch was able to say about women and Hindus.... It is there in verses 34 and 35:
"I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who ..... does what is right is acceptable..."That realization becomes a major theme in world literature, music, movies and in our family lives. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevya is challenged to give up the aspects of his tradition which captured his daughters in loveless lives though Tevya, like Walter, had an incomplete transformation because he could not let his heart go far enough to approve of his youngest daughter marrying a gentile.
Look, it is even a theme in our science fiction movies.... The Xmen series of films is all about mutants and non-mutants accepting one another. The most expensive film ever made, Avatar, is about the violent misunderstandings between the invading humans and the native Na'vi on the planet of Pandora.
It seems like we never get tired of this story of white man meets Indian and the Indian becomes European and the settler becomes an Indian.
We keep telling this story, in one form or another, because, it seems, we have never yet gotten it just right.
When populations were more isolated, it was not uncommon for a mountain village to evolve a theory that the people on the other side of the mountain have horns and devil tails. No less a scholar than St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote his great apologetic philosophy arguing for the existence of God because he had heard of but never met the Muslim Turks. For even a genius like Aquinas, to think that someone did not believe in Jesus and the God of the Bible could only mean that the were, in effect, atheists and so he wrote voluminously to correct the belief that there is no God.
We are, quite predictably, both fascinated by and irrationally afraid of people who are different from us. Those of us born and bred in the land locked core of America will spend our hard earned dollars to travel to the Caribbean, to Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia to see different people, hear different languages, taste different food and learn about different cultures but then we will start to sweat if we see a woman wearing a Muslim head scarf at the mall, or realize that we cannot communicate with the people who are putting the shingles on our house or if an inter-racial couple moves in next door.
One Indian or Asian doctor at the hospital is interesting or exotic but if we see dozens of immigrants filling the roles of physician, pharmacist, priest and professor, then we panic a bit.
St. Peter had grown up believing that gentiles eat blood, worship idols, have orgies and they bath infrequently..... according to Luke, it took God performing a miracle right in front of his eyes for him to come to the realization: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who.... does what is right is acceptable."
Peter was able to let go of the division between Jews and gentiles. Walter Rauschenbusch began to show Christians how to let go of the divisions between the rich and the poor. His sister, Emma, helped lead the way in bringing equality to men and women. Martin Luther King helped us to see that we need to judge people on their character rather than the color of their skin.
We've spent the better part of the last generation trying to work out a way to let go of our prejudices about sexual orientation and the failure of diplomacy between the people of the Middle East and the peoples of Europe and America has shown us that we still have a lot to learn to get to the place where we can say with Peter, "I now see that God shows no partiality," so that we can someday say that we don't show partiality either.
