“The Emerging Church (from the ashes of the old church)”

“The Emerging Church (from the ashes of the old church)”   Jan. 5, 2020   Dr. Ray

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Bishop Oscar A. Romero

 “A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?”

  

 

A statue of Jesus in India recently began to drip water from the statue’s toes. Local Christians thought that they were witnessing a miracle and they began to collect and drink the miraculous water, hoping for a blessing.

However, tests run on the water and an ensuing investigation from a plumber led to the discovery that the water was coming from a nearby leaking toilet . . . which would hardly deserve mention here were it not for the very clear way that it symbolizes everything that I have come to hate about traditional expressions of religion. 

The Jesus who was an advocate for the outcast and the poor, the sick, the hungry, the spat upon, and rejected . . . the Jesus who stood up to the might of the Roman occupation army to teach a message of radical compassion and paid for it with his life, in the hands of the church becomes nothing but a magical “get out of the grave free” amulet, reducing the poor, ignorant, sick, and marginalized to drinking toilet water and thinking that it is a blessing. 

I find it somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church under its first South American born pope is working to beatify Oscar Romero, calling him a saint in 2020 when the institutional church that produced Pope Francis, may have been complicit in his murder in El Salvador in 1980. When Pope Francis was a bishop in Argentina, he said little to protect the liberation theology priests of Latin America and may, in fact, have turned over names to authorities of priests to be tortured and murdered. 

If you do not know Oscar Romero’s story, I highly recommend the movie “Romero” to you. For those of you here in Springfield, I have a copy of the movie that I will gladly lend to you.  Romero was chosen to be Archbishop in El Salvador as “safe” choice. He was a theological scholar and a loyal Catholic priest who was expected to moderate the tensions between the military, the ruling class, and the poor who lived in El Salvador. 

But, I will tell you this about the progressive movement, about what it means to fall headlong into liberation theology . . . it is like pulling a thread in a knit sweater and there is not stopping place until the whole thing is unraveled. When you are in the institution, when you have been taught to drink the toilet water with devotion, once you get to look behind the statue and see where the water is coming from, your feelings about the institution can never be restored.

Please indulge me a moment to share a parable from Hindu Vedantic Philosophy:

A man was walking in the gathering darkness of late evening when he felt something brush against his leg. He looked down and saw a poisonous snake coiled by the path, and immediately he could feel the burning of venom coursing through his veins. He fell to the ground, crying out for help. 

A man with a lamp runs to his aid and in the light of the lamp, it is revealed that the coiled snake is not a snake at all, but rather, a coiled-up rope. Once the man who had been bitten saw the rope, when the truth dawned on him, he no longer felt the burning poison and his fear and dread left him. Once you have clearly seen the rope, no one could ever again convince you that it is a snake. 

Being Archbishop brought the cries of the liberation theology priests who were being beaten, imprisoned, and tortured to his ears. He got out among the people and his eyes were opened to the cruelty of the government oppression of the poor, in ways that they never were in a classroom or inside of the sanctuary of a church. 

So, when he said, “A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?” Romero had discovered that there was a snake in El Salvador and the church had been telling the people it was a rope. 

Romero became a courageous advocate for the poor. He was a saint to the people of El Salvador, long before the Vatican found a conscience.

And so, on March 24, 1980, the government of El Salvador sent an assassin who had been trained by the United States military at Ft. Benning, Georgia, to kill Bishop Romero while he was saying mass in a small convent. All indication are that this was done with the tacit approval of the communist fearing, Pope John Paul II, who had Romero’s grave hidden so that no one could make a martyr out of him . . . the martyr Pope Francis has now made a saint, in much the same way that the American government, after spying on, jailing, beating and harassing Martin Luther King, Jr. until he was assassinated, a few years later made him a virtual American saint by naming a federal holiday after him. 

A few years ago I was asked to leave a local NAACP meeting when I pitched a fit about their proposal to observe Martin Luther King Day by recruiting young people to pick up litter by our city streets. Picking up litter is not a bad thing to do, in fact, it is a good thing to do, but I asked, “Do you think James Earl Ray shot King because he wanted to pick up trash off the streets?” 

The church, the state, the schools, tend to tame our prophets, pull the teeth from our tigers . . . we name streets in dangerous neighborhoods after them . . . make them a saint for the poor to pray to, only after we have killed him and sealed him in a grave for two generations.

A little over a year ago, Dan Goodwin, Paul Thomlinson and I spent way too much money on a nostalgia trip to go hear Elton John in concert in St. Louis. It was an amazing show. 

The aging rock star did not let time cause him to pull any punches as he pounded on his piano and sang for two hours. On the way home, the lyrics of Burn Down the Mission kept echoing in my head . . . burn down the mission, if you want to stay alive . . . For things are getting desperate in our home  Living in the parish of the restless folks I know . . . Behind four walls of stone the rich man sleeps   It's time we put the flame torch to their keep

Most days I would hear that figuratively, but I will admit that there have been times when I believed that if there really were a supernatural theistic god up in the clouds that we would wake up one day and find only smoldering, hot, greasy, places on the ground where most churches used to be. Sometimes it seems like the church is a prison that has to be burned down before people can be free to experience the truth, not just about God, but about themselves. 

Now, I have to pull the curtain back a bit and honestly tell you that I sketched out this sermon a few months ago to be a first message of the decade to hit traditional churches in the face with accusations of hypocrisy for basically giving people toilet water to drink when they are living in a world that is being turned into a cesspool through environmental degradation, and that is being taught to live with lies and corruption from our government, and to acquiesce to the violence of poverty, racism, and sexism we now face.

But as much as I want to be spiritual philosopher more than I am a commentator on current events, I would be a hypocrite if I came here today and talked about ethics as a general topic and ignored the fact that on Thursday night, what was Friday morning in Iraq, our government committed what all nations have agreed to be illegal and unethical, a state sponsored political assassination.

 The media and President Trump want for us to believe, unquestioningly, that Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was a bad guy, maybe even a terrorist. But he was no Osama Bin Laden. He was a member of the government of Iran who evidently was uniquely good at his assigned military task. I’m not going to even pretend to put him on trial. I had never heard of him before he was killed Thursday night. He might have been an especially bad actor from the perspective of the USA, Israel, and the Saudis but he was a hero to many Sunnis in Iran and Iraq. 

I don’t want to go all legalistic on you this morning, but in 1981, Ronald Regan signed executive order 12333 stating that, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Which was a finger pointing at the CIA telling them to stop their decades long effort to poison Fidel Castro. As a part of the civilized world, we may kill people on a battlefield, but we don’t assassinate political leaders. I hope that I am not alone among the hundreds of thousands of preachers speaking in pulpits across our land today in pointing out this criminal act carried out on our behalf.

But beyond such fine points of law and international relations, without judging whether or not General Soleimani was such a threat to world peace and stability that he needed to be killed, let’s allow ourselves a moment to ask ourselves, “Why have we been at war in the Middle East for 20 years now and in an ‘on and off’ way for 80 years?”

I’m going to boil it down to a pretty simplistic explanation. I believe that we can trace our military involvement in the oil-rich Middle East to the invention of the automobile. 

Coal powered passenger trains and electrically powered trolleys and subways began to be elbowed out as gas powered cars took their place. The economy soon began to revolve around the manufacture of automobiles, building roads and bridges, and covering the landscape and ever city intersection with gas stations and mechanics shops. 

We now burn about 150 billion gallons of gas every year, affecting the marketplace and our home budget whenever the price of gas changes. But we are sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to oil producing countries and we can hardly stand the thought of even a temporary interruption to the flow of that fuel. 

America actually benefits by the regional disputes among oil producing nations because that gives them incentive to both produce more oil at a lower price and to buy more military hardware from us. That’s why, when Iran and Iraq were at war with each other for a decade, we watched with a certain fiscal satisfaction, playing both sides against one another. But it leaves us persistently involved in ways that is bad for us and bad for them.

There are two major divisions of the Islamic world, the Sunnis and the Shia. If I took the names off of this map, most Americans could not have told you where Syria is, nor would they know that it borders Iraq, Israel, and Jordan. And if this map were not color coded, would you know that both Iran and Iraq are majority Shia, and that Saudi Arabia is mostly Sunni and Yemen is mostly Shia?

I don’t want to say that all of the regional conflicts in the Middle East can be explained by tribal rivalries but it is not all exaggeration to say that we have now spent about $4 trillion dollars on what amounts to civil wars in which we have done nothing but make matters worse and inspired global terrorism. Yes, Sadaam Hussein was a bad man and an evil ruler. Hussein kept his Sunni Baathist government in power through cruel oppression of the Kurds and of the Shia. His government is responsible for about a quarter of a million deaths during his 24 years in power. So, we came in as liberators and in less than 20 years, we have killed nearly 300,000 Iraqi civilians trying to maintain order. As bad as Hussein was, what we have proven is that there is not a workable military solution to the conflicts within this part of the world.

But what could we do? It may not surprise you to learn that I have a suggestion.

 If America went on a wartime footing of building the infrastructure necessary to generate electricity from wind and solar sources, and we started commuting in electric cars, trains, busses, trolleys, and subways, 

Then we could stop sending hundreds of billions of dollars to this war-torn region and stop spending nearly a hundred billion every year protecting the flow of the oil supply globally. The same solution that can save our planet, can also being an end to most wars, and stabilize the global economic flow of resources. 

 And we have the added bonus of not having to deploy our American droids to assassinate anyone to maintain our access to sunlight and wind. 

You ought to expect religious people like me to be against war, assassination, and murder. And yet, when a preacher gets too far out there on these things, they might get fired, or like Martin Luther King, or Oscar Romero, they might get shot. And so, for the most part, the church is silent on matters like war, political assassination, and even on our lethal addiction to oil that keeps us from focusing on renewable energy. And if the church can remain silent when the stakes are this high, then, if I may return to my previous point, what is the use of that kind of church? . . . that kind of gospel? If that is all it is going to do, then we do need to burn them down, if we’re gonna stay alive. 

Burn them down, so that a new and more useful kind of church might rise up out of the ashes to start telling the truth in an empire built on lies.