[Oe List ...] 5/21/20, Progressing Spirit: Mark Sandlin: The Strangeness of Jesus, Equality, and Voting in the U.S.; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu May 21 07:26:09 PDT 2020
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The Strangeness of Jesus,
Equality, and Voting in the U.S.
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| Essay by Rev. Mark Sandlin
May 21, 2020(Author's note: While this article is going out to people around the world, the current events in the nation in which I live, the U.S., have reached a point that I feel I must address. I hope and believe that the perspective I share here is still relevant and informative for many folks who live in other nations).
It is difficult to read the teachings of Jesus and come away thinking that some people deserve to have more privileges than others. We are not only suppose to love our neighbors, but we are also suppose to love our enemies – equally. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us, “a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.” And, in an age when women were viewed as second-class citizens, we have textual evidence that women played a very important role in Jesus' ministry.
Interestingly enough, that kind of equality is a fundamental concept of democracy which is designed to provide for the political, legal, and moral equality of all citizens. In other words, in a fully realized and developed democracy, there should be no second-class citizens.
Now, there are various types of democracies and, historically, some do a better job at maintaining the equality of all citizens. At the core of each, however, is a value that was taught by Jesus as well as many great spiritual teachers: all people should be treated with equality.
While it is certainly true, that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation, it is also true that Christians make up a majority of Americans, which I find strange when I consider the current state of our nation. Let me explain.
Being that we not only think of ourselves as a democratic nation but were actually founded as a democratic nation, everyone is to be treated equally, at the same time, we are to be ruled by the desires of the majority – hence, elections. That's where it gets all kinds of strange. It's the kind of “strange” that should infuriate, motivate, and embarrass the majority of Christians who “claim the name” of Christian, but it doesn't.
As I write this article, the U.S. headlines in the news tell the story of a “democracy” that has no equality of all citizens. We read of a black man being gunned down by a conservative white man and his son in the streets of Alabama while he was simply out for a jog as he does most days; and we also read of conservative white men armed to the teeth (in one case even including a bazooka) protesting in state capitals who are ignored at the most or celebrated at the worst.
Does our democracy have second-class citizens? Yes, we do. Does our democracy have a privileged-class? Yes, we most certainly do. That's some kind of “democracy,” huh?
That's one of the ways this is all so strange. We live in a nation where more that 70% of its citizens identify as Christian, yet as recent elections have shown us, they are not only happy to vote for leadership in government that turns a blind eye to these severe kinds of inequality, they are actively seeking leadership that actually promotes such behavior.
Does that kind of behavior sound like what the behavior of folks attempting to follow the teachings of the man who said, “a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him,” should be? I certainly don't think so. Does it sound like the behavior of people who were told, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Again, I certainly don't think so.
But it is “stranger” than all of that. We've established that Jesus taught his followers the importance of creating a just and equitable society. We also recognize that a fundamental concept in democracy includes political equality for all people, and we know that at the heart of any democracy is voting.
Given all of that, it would logically follow that in the democracy of the U.S., where the majority of citizens are Christian, access to voting should be a primary concern and desire of the majority of citizens. However, we all know that it isn't.
The reality is, many of the officials who were democratically elected seem to actively promote certain severe forms of inequality. It may be that this is particularly true at the voting booths, the very heart of any true democracy. In other words, these democratically elected officials are working diligently to destroy any real presence of democracy.
All too often, they do it in the name of God, or at least use the name of God to manipulate the majority of Americans to, at best, turn a blind eye to it or, at worst, celebrate it.
They then turn around and promote American exceptionalism and the American Dream even as they are pitifully proud of having knowingly inserted so many obstacles into the democratic process that they have effectively killed the American Dream for those who struggle the most and ripped away any realistic claim that the U.S. is exceptionally virtuous, not even to its own citizens. From closing down polling centers, requiring voter-IDs, voting-roll purges, to (more recently) actively opposing vote-by-mail efforts in the midst of a pandemic, they are creating conditions that destroy any real possibility of political equality for those on the margins of society.
Despite their frequent veiled or direct claims that the U.S. is a Christian nation, when confronted with the inequitable realities of the election system they have created, they frequently make calls to rugged individualism and the need for people to persevere. It does not seem to occur to them that such calls from places of power stand over and against biblical teachings about the duties of the powerful to help those who struggle.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way, “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
America's conservative Christian elected officials (and many of the people who put them there) have effectively stolen the boots of many minorities and now demand that they pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They actively sell the modern myth of rugged individualism in the U.S. like a snake-oil salesman who killed off the town doctor. And, all too frequently, they do it in the name of God or in the name of Jesus, without bothering to pay any real attention to what the Bible actually says.
I, for one, have no desire for a Christian nation (particularly one that is some Bizarro reflection of what Christianity is supposed to be). I suspect that those who closely follow the teachings of Jesus feel the same way. At the same time, if we do value the teachings of Jesus, we cannot sit idly by as the powerful use God's name in vain in order to build their power and wealth on the backs of the people who the system relegates to the margins of society.
There are many ways to work toward change in the ironically unjust democracy. One key way is through truly democratic voting where each person has equal ability (not access, ability) to vote. There's a reason we are seeing so much negativity around the question of vote-by-mail from democratically elected officials who are working diligently to destroy any real presence of democracy. They oppose it because voting by mail levels the playing field for most Americans. It removes the intentional obstacles which have been created to thwart off any true democracy at the polls.
If you need a place to start, if you need an issue to invest in, if you want to help begin restoring the value of equality in the U.S., vote-by-mail may be the single best and impactful place to begin. And, it has the added value of allowing you to act out of and in support of your own personal religious beliefs.
~ Rev. Mark Sandlin
Read online here
About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By John
Do you, like me, have great sympathy for the third servant in the parable of the talents? What do you think that this parable is meant to say to 21st century humans? John (a Quaker from Plymouth, England)
A: By Rev Jessica Shine
Dear John,John, I’m SO glad you asked this question! At first I didn’t quite get it, but then as I re-read the sacred text I realized how much of my former theology had been shaped by patriarchal evangelical theology - especially here! So first, thank you for inviting a new perspective for me!Honestly, I’ve never felt sympathy for the third servant (this story appears in Matthew 25 and Luke 19). As an ‘A-‘ personality type, I’ve thought ‘you snooze you lose!’ Or even better ‘use it or lose it’! In my world, I earn my worth by what I produce so of course bigger is better. For a while, that was my theology too… at least part of me is letting that go, thank goodness!Look, there are a lot of weird parts of this story: where is the master going? Why is he called a master? What exactly are these people entrusted with and is there more? The whole master/slave concept is a doozy which doesn’t get much better in Greek, as ‘master' can also be translated ‘teacher/leader’ and ‘slave’ can also be translated ‘servant'. There could be several more articles written about how Greek aristocracy, theology, and language (not Jesus) influenced how white Americans will view slavery and 500 years later, racism. But that’s not for today.When I re-read this, I realized that my former Christianity used this story to propagate Capitalism (which cheapens the lesson by the way). If you don’t believe me, ask yourself how you see the value of each character and why?Here’s the bottom line, the master isn’t compassionate with the slave who fearfully hides the estate entrusted to him. The master is furious. The third servant clearly operates from a sense of scarcity, ‘at least I didn’t lose money’ is his thinking. This story seems to suggest, however, that the master would have at least liked to know his third slave engaged in some form of business, or engaged with what was entrusted to him. Instead he sat on it. He was indifferent. Maybe he thought he could bury it and the master would make his own profit, since the master in this story can make money from nothing.Some scholars interpret this lack of engagement to mean there is a lack of relationship. There’s no relationship between the slave and his master, or the slave and the ‘stuff’ and this is what becomes clear as the master leaves the scene. Somehow this master can reap where he didn’t sow and earn money where he hasn’t done business. Either he’s shady and corrupt (totally possible) or he’s not afraid to take some risk.Now Jesus doesn’t seem to give license to reckless spending here, and to be honest it doesn’t seem like this story is all about saving up for a rainy day. It seems instead that the master was operating from an abundance mindset. So what if the point of this story isn’t to get more (hello capitalism)? What if the invitation here is that the master isn’t afraid of risk?When I read this, I see Jesus, again telling a story about a kin-dom that demands relationship first. Relationships are risk. Relationships are hard. Good relationships are even harder. Risk is about who we let in, how we live, where we work, and how we lead our kids. But the good news here is that the master’s primary concern isn’t risk, otherwise he would have expressed gratitude for not losing anything. I think Jesus is calling forth a community who are able to engage with reality, risk, and each other. This community doesn’t hide from vulnerability because the chances of deeper relationship are so worth it. Jesus is teaching that community is a reflection of our relationship to the “master” (whatever that is for you). That a good teacher/leader/supervisor turns over authority to others, not to profit from their hard work, but instead to give them an opportunity to interact with risk. Because Jesus isn’t afraid of risk here. It seems that, as in the most meaningful parts of life, in this story the true enemy isn’t fear, it’s apathy. No emotion. No concern. No relationship.Is how I’m living and engaging in relationship reflective of the Love I have found in Jesus? Or am I operating from a scarcity mindset? Or even worse an apathetic one.~ Rev. Jessica Shine
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Jessica Shine earned degrees in theology and divinity, but still hasn’t figured out how to walk on water. Despite this, she was ordained to ministry by the Seventh-day Adventist church and continues offering spiritual care as a clergy member of The CHI Interfaith Community (based in Berkeley, CA). With two decades of experience serving church communities, police officers, hospital staff, and teenagers, Shine has a passion for people and a skill for communicating in transformative ways. She is a descendant of Mexican, Indian, and Western European immigrants. Her spirituality began in childhood, was influenced by Jimmy Swaggart and Mother Theresa, and continues in the Pacific Northwest. She dwells on lands where Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and many other tribes made their homes. Shine also co-hosts a podcast on death and dying called “Done For” (available on iTunes, Google, and at doneforpodcast.com). |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the Bible, Part XXVIII:
The Chronicler — Final Chapter of the Old Testament
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 23, 2009The Old Testament, as we Christians organize it, closes in the post-exile period of Jewish history. That would date its final works in the mid to late 300s BCE. The biblical story thus comes to a conclusion in a very difficult period of Jewish history. They were a defeated nation returning from exile and trying to lay claim to their former country, which had now been settled by other people for several generations. Those settlers were not happy to welcome the returning Jews, nor did they recognize the Jewish claim to their land. So it was that resistance against the Jews was high and hostility toward them was intense.
Survival required that the Jews erect symbols of their permanence. This meant rebuilding the protective wall around Jerusalem, rebuilding the city itself and ultimately rebuilding their Temple, which was an outward symbol of their claim to live in this land. The Temple proclaimed that this land belonged to their God, who had given it to them. Some of the less inspired minor prophets like Haggai, Nahum, Zephaniah and Obadiah, whom we treated with only a brief paragraph in this series, spoke for this nationalistic fervor. They were tribal figures in the service of a tribal religion. The four final books that I will cover to complete our study of the origins of the Old Testament are products of this period. They are I and II Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah.
Most people have no sense or image of the books of the Chronicler. Much of the material in them is also contained, sometimes verbatim, in the books of I and II Kings. Ezra and Nehemiah were originally part of the corpus of the Chronicler, so all of these books are deeply interrelated. The Chronicler, however, was not a historian in the sense that he made no effort to discover the facts of history; he was rather a theologian whose primary purpose was to retell Jewish history from his particular theological perspective. He wanted to inform the Jews of his generation of what it would be like to be properly the people of God. He did this by describing the reigns of Kings David and Solomon not as they were, but as they ought to have been. So, in the books of Chronicles, we get idealized kings who are not really human.
Nowhere is this idealized theme better noted than in the Chronicler’s description of King David’s final sickness, in which the king was portrayed as laying out in minute detail the plans for the building of the Temple. This was the Chronicler’s way of suggesting that even the Temple was the product of David’s reign rather than of Solomon’s. Compare that with the story of King David’s final days as told by the much earlier book of Kings. Here David is a sick and incapacitated old man, who could not govern in his weakness, so a court intrigue developed around his heir. Solomon, who was hardly the firstborn son of King David, became the eventual winner of this struggle. His claim to the throne was modest to say the least. He was the second child of the adulterous relationship between King David and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, whom David had had murdered. David had many older and more nobly born sons who might have succeeded him. The most obvious candidate was Adonijah, who was backed by both Abiathar the priest and Joab, David’s military chief of staff. Solomon, however, aided by his mother, who had obviously become as close to a queen as David ever had, joined with Zadok, the priest, Nathan the prophet and Benaiah, a military leader, to pull off the coup that had Solomon crowned king with David’s blessing even prior to David’s death, dashing the hopes of all potential challengers.
It was also suggested in the book of Kings that as he neared death King David was suffering from chills that could not be overcome even with many blankets. So his attendants decided on a new strategy. They would conduct a “Miss Israel” contest to determine the most beautiful woman in the land. The winner’s prize would be to lie with the sick king to warm his chilled body with her own. When Abishag the Shunammite was chosen, she immediately entered Jewish folklore and was said to have been the inspiration for the romantic material in the biblical book known as “The Song of Songs” or the “Song of Solomon.” I submit that this is a rather different end of life story from contemplating the dimensions of the yet to be built Temple.
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are also the work of the Chronicler. In one of the later returns from captivity the group was led by Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the governor. One learns more, however, about Ezra by reading the book of Nehemiah than one learns about Nehemiah. Two things, however, occur in these last two books of the Bible that shape later history. The first is that a story is told (see Nehemiah 8) about how a new and expanded law, or Torah, was brought to Ezra the priest to read to the assembly of the people. After this reading, the people covenanted with God to obey this law and to enjoin its precepts on the common life of the newly established Jewish nation.
Many scholars believe that this is the only biblical reference to the completion of the Torah (Genesis to Deuteronomy, also called “the books of Moses”) that was done during the Babylonian Exile and was subsequently incorporated into Jewish life as the most holy of all Jewish writings. You may recall that when we began this series on the origins of the Bible, we identified at least four major strands that made up the Torah. The earliest was a work now called the Yahwist document because it called God by the name of Yahweh. The author was a court historian, probably during the reign of King Solomon (ca. 960-920 BCE), who was charged with writing the sacred history of the Jewish people. He did so extolling the institutions that gained prominence at the time of King David. Those institutions were four in number: the royal line of David, the city of Jerusalem, the Temple, and the office of the high priest. These four institutions were the strength of the Jewish people and this first strand of their sacred scriptures told the story of the origin of these institutions and the favor with which God looked upon them.
The second strand was known as the Elohist document because it called God by the name of Elohim, or El. It was the product of the 9th century (ca. 850 BCE) in the Northern Kingdom. This narrative was written to justify the rebellion of the Northern Kingdom after its secession from Judah, Jerusalem, the Royal House of David, the Temple and its priesthood. When the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, someone brought this version of Jewish sacred writing to Jerusalem and in time the Yahwist and the Elohist versions were woven together, with the original Yahwist version of the earliest history of the Jewish nation dominant.
The third strand of the Torah was the work of the Deuteronomic writers, who created not only the book of Deuteronomy, which was added to the growing text, but who also edited the entire sacred corpus in the light of the Deuteronomic insights. This revision occurred around the year 625 BCE. Finally, there was what we call “the Priestly Version,” a product of the exile itself, including the years of the return, in which all of the rules governing both liturgy and ethics were recorded. The book of Leviticus is a typical piece of the material composed by the priestly writers. It covers every jot and tittle of Jewish life.
Whenever the Torah was changed, the people had to authenticate the new version in a liturgical setting. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah thus record the moment in post-exilic Jewish history when that final version of the Torah reached acceptance. Most scholars believe that the Torah has been relatively the same from that day to this.
The final note that needs to be lifted up from this last strand of material to be incorporated into the Hebrew Scriptures was the rising presence of ethnic isolation. The Jewish people were torn between two realities. First, they believed that they were God’s chosen people. Second, they were a defeated, exiled nation. That was a strange way for God to treat the chosen people. The Jews thus spent much time trying to understand this dilemma. What had they done wrong? Why was God punishing them so severely? How had they failed? Who were the culprits? After much discussion, a consensus emerged and was reflected in the book of Ezra. It suggested that many Jewish people had corrupted their ethnic purity by intermarrying with Gentiles. This, the pundits argued, had corrupted the faith and practice of the Jews by allowing foreign practices in their life and worship that had angered God. The punishment of the people for this violation of their call to ethnic purity was defeat and exile. To avoid a catastrophe like this from ever happening again, Ezra, the priest, propounded a doctrine of racial purity and ordered the non-Jewish partners of Jewish citizens and any half-breed children that were produced by these unholy unions to be banished from the land.
The new Judah was to be for Jews only! Ethnic cleansing began in the land of the Jews. People had to defend their bloodlines up to fourteen generations as vigilantes roamed the land. Prejudice against non-Jews became rampant. Before these passions had run their course, as all religious zealotry always does, it had produced two pieces of protest literature that were also included in the Bible. One was the book of Jonah, in which God ordered the prophet to preach to the unclean Gentiles. When Jonah refused on the basis of his understanding of ethnic purity and its assumption that all Gentiles are unworthy even to hear “the word of God,” he had to endure the adventures, including the great fish, which made the book of Jonah so exciting. The second was the book of Ruth, a whimsical story about a Moabite woman who served her Jewish mother-in-law well and finally married a man named Boaz who turned out to be David’s great-grandfather. The purpose of this book was thus to state that King David had a Moabite grandmother and was thus by Ezra’s rules unclean.
We have now completed our survey of the Hebrew Scriptures, the first part of our Christian Bible. In September, we will begin our journey through the New Testament. I hope you will stay tuned.~ John Shelby Spong |
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