The not-so-new victim politics

A friend sent this link to me — an interesting (if thoroughly depressing) read. It is an article entitled “Rock, Paper, Scissors of PC Victimology: Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews”. Please do go have a read.

The thought that keeps going through my mind about this is that human beings are intensely social creatures obsessed with hierarchy. As soon as one tool for creating and enforcing such a hierarchy passes away — feudalism, say — we come up with another one to replace it. For all the rhetoric of our modern society claiming to be egalitarian and democratic, we are anything but, and things like this are nothing more than schoolyard bullying in an ongoing struggle for greater social status, whatever the cost.

Thus I don’t see it as a “new” victim politics, but rather something very old indeed, as old as humanity itself. In the 20th century, there were plenty of such examples of people framing others as heterodox and heaping abuse on them, like within Communism (the Cultural Revolution was a major example, as were Stalin’s purges). Contrary to the article’s claim that this is a thing of the left, the right was and is quite capable of the same thing. Witness the outrage you see on Fox News for anything “un-American” or McCarthyism. Going further back, Muslims and Christians were quite happy to denounce each other — Sunni vs. Shia, Catholic vs. Orthodox vs. Protestant, orthodox Christian vs. “heretics” of various stripes — over trivialities. Quite often these denouncements ended in outright mass murder. And as the manifold examples of the 20th century make clear, religion had little to do with it. It is just one label amongst many that can be seized upon to beat up on someone else. Take away religion, people will find something else — anything to make your identity better than someone else’s in the eyes of others.

Take away religion, politics, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and sports, and people will seize on the color of a dress to beat each other up with.

Maybe we’re not resorting to physical violence as much as we once did (duels, brawls, catfights, wars, genocides), but we’re becoming that much more adept at psychological violence to replace it. Progress of a sort, I suppose, but deep down little if anything has changed.

The final irony is that by framing this phenomenon as something “new” and mocking it as “victim politics”, the author is himself engaging in this very sort of hierarchical power politics without realizing it.

TL;DR — people suck.

Antireligion: All the evidence you need

The claim has often been made by antireligious* polemicists that religion is the source of all evil, and if only we would get rid of religion, then Bambi's mother would come back and we would all would live happily while singing Imagine. Oh, and religious persons are inherently intolerant, bigoted troglodytes blinkered by their own beliefs and unable to engage in intelligent debate.

If you want some evidence that abandoning religion is anything but a cure for bad behavior, in fact quite possibly the opposite, may I present the comments in this post over at the Guardian's website. Keep in mind that the author of the article is himself an atheist and skeptic – and read the reaction from the great mass of enlightened superior co-nonreligionists.

If I was Prof. Came, I'd be thinking with friends like this, who needs enemies. Good grief.

* - I deliberately do not use the term "atheist" or "New Atheist" to describe such persons. First, not all atheists are necessarily against religion per se. Second, I dislike the label "New Atheists" because of the way it has been used to tar a lot of people with a broad brush. Third, many of those against religion are not in fact atheist, but agnostic, a distinction that seems to be lost on many people, including many atheists. The adjective "antireligious" seems to me to be far more accurate – and far more appropriate.

Catalyst: Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35

When we talk about religion, or about belief in general, one of the common criticisms is that religion supposedly seeks to divide the world. Critics of religion tell us that religion thrives off of division and fear, that it foments discord and creates problems, only to claim to solve them itself. How many times have you heard the tired claim that religion is the cause of all wars, for example?

Today’s readings offer an excellent counterpoint. True enough, the God of Israel we find in the Old Testament pretty clearly divided the world into Jew and Gentile – the People of Israel, and everyone else. That would seem to play into the hands of the critics. God set apart this one elite of people, so obviously God is an elitist jerk out to play us off against one another, right?

But the reading from Acts is the decisive turning point. At this point in the story, the Apostles were one and all observant Jews. They would have all been circumcised; they would have all obeyed the Law, kept the feasts, ate only kosher food and so on. They would also have normally refrained from contact with non-Jews – that is, with Gentiles. Us. Pretty divisive stuff. Since this was all God’s idea, clearly God is to blame for dividing us into Jew and Gentile – or so the critics would have you believe.

But Peter, who after the death and resurrection of Jesus has become in effect the earthly figurehead of the Christians, has a vision where he is encouraged to eat strange things. The animals on the cloth dropping from heaven are all quite explicitly things that Jews were not allowed to eat – hence the quote, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat; what God has made clean, you must not call profane”. Peter takes this as a message that it is time to not only consort with the unclean uncircumcised – i.e. Gentiles – but to actively love them. He realizes that God’s love is most certainly not just for Israel, that the unclean Gentile is not profane. He says, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” So he realizes, this gift is not just for Israel at all. It is for all of humanity. And it is the task of all Christians to not just share this love amongst themselves, but with all human beings.

God gave Israel a special gift, the gift of being the first people to clearly hear and follow His voice. That gift is not one of division at all. It is more like choosing the right catalyst.

In chemistry, a “catalyst” is a substance or thing that is necessary to set off a reaction, to set a process in motion. A catalyst works by creating an alternate pathway for energy to flow, for electrons to be exchanged, to set different molecules in contact with one another that would otherwise avoid each other. A catalyst can also be an enzyme in the bloodstream, making it possible for the body to absorb nutrients that it needs to live. When the body introduces that enzyme, that catalyst, into the bloodstream, it is clearly not changing anything – it didn’t change its mind suddenly and abruptly decided to make enzymes for the sheer sake of making enzymes. Instead, it does so as part of a natural, necessary process. Our bodies need catalysts to even work, to grow, to prosper. It is the exact same principle in human history. God never changes His mind, but rather, at certain times a new stage of God’s plan opens up before us, as God adds another catalyst to the mix.

The catalyst in human history is the voice of the One God calling to Abraham from the tent of stars, which created the People of Israel. That catalyst reappears as the voice calling to Moses from the burning bush, welding the People of Israel together, so that they could enter the Promised Land. That same catalyst reappears as the One Savior Jesus Christ bringing the Apostles together, to start a chain reaction; He gave them the gift of Himself, so that they would give of themselves.

Peter stands here before the Jews, and once again acts as a catalyst. The Jews he lives with have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. But they still are blind to what the full meaning of this is. They criticize him for consorting with Gentiles, with the uncircumcised. But Peter tells them about his vision, of people liberated from those laws and strictures, and united under one God, no differences, no barriers, no walls, no borders, no bars on the windows. That vision of one people, one humanity, one God, is the ultimate vision of oneness – the very opposite, the antithesis of division.

In the Gospel, Jesus gives us His parting words, just before he is betrayed to certain death, after the Last Supper. He tells them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Where Moses was the catalyst welding Israel together, Jesus Christ is the catalyst to weld us all together, from all nations and peoples.

Far from religion dividing us, Jesus is telling us to love one another as He loves all of us. God loves us all infinitely. The great catalyst in the chemistry of human history is there not to cause explosions or discord or dissent, but to fuse us all together into one whole, to reconcile, to love, to share. There was never a change in plans because God or we human beings screwed up; instead, it was all part of God’s plan, as He added catalyst after catalyst to the mix to get the result He wants. That result is what we call the Kingdom of Heaven.

We see a glimpse of that goal, the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time, in the Book of Revelation. ‘I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”’

This is what Jesus wants for us, and what the Will of God has always been and always shall be. An end to war, an end to pain, an end to suffering. But we are the keys to this. We are all catalysts if we care to be, catalysts for peace and justice. Each of us was added to the mix to fulfill our greater purpose. But we can only do it to the fullest if we obey that last commandment of Jesus. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Everything we do, every waking moment of our lives, should be tested against that one sentence. We must let Jesus act as a catalyst in our hearts, so that we can act as a catalyst in our wider society.

When we do this, Jesus is working through us. We literally become the limbs and hands of Christ, the true Body of Christ. Jesus works His miracles through His body, and that’s us. And it’s Jesus who is seated on the throne saying, “See, I am making all things new”. With His help, we can make all things new, now and forever.

But there is a catch. Critics of religion have one thing dead-on: We as Christians have to live up to our fine words. All too often we Christians have made excuses for our failure to live up to the Gospel. Critics of religion love to point out the hypocrisy and moral failures of Christian leaders. Even many Christians like to feel just a little vindicated and more than a little Schadenfreude when the likes of Bishop Mixa or Käßmann are hoisted on their own petards – where they acted as great moralizers, their own moral failures weakened them. But here again is the answer for us – not to give up, to toss religion onto the scrapheap of history just because our leaders have failed us, but to try harder ourselves. The critics of religion do us a favor, by holding up a mirror and reminding us that we aren’t what we should be, by our own standards. What the world needs is not more self-proclaimed hypocritical self-serving Christians looking for a cheap ticket to Heaven. What it needs is real Christians – those who say what they mean and do what they say in the name of Jesus, whatever the consequences.

Imagine how impressed people are when they find a “real” Christian – someone who really does live as Jesus taught. Someone like, for example, Frère Roger of Taizé, a very simple and humble man who acted as a catalyst to reignite Christianity in Europe and worldwide. Before Taizé became well-known and popular, Christianity was arguably dying in Europe; arguably it is still very feeble. But Frère Roger’s personal credibility, his soul like a flame, his humility and care for others, was a catalyst that started a fire to reignite the spirit of the Church in Europe and far beyond.

Potential Frère Rogers are all around us. You and I could just as well do things as great as he did, passing on the fire of our conviction and love of one another. You might think that’s preposterous, but if you think hard about it, what’s stopping us from doing it? Only ourselves, our own narrow interests – nothing else. The answer to this is not “I can’t”, but “I’ll try my best”.

Each of us can be another catalyst that makes the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven come that much closer. When we drop our own cares and worries, when we forget about all the things that bother us, when we stop letting our own goals and desires dictate our lives, we gain the inner peace and resolve to spread the peace we suddenly find in ourselves. The true catalyst for this peace, inside and outside, as it always was and ever shall be, is love. Like it says in an old Beatles song, “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”. Amen.

Believing in doubt: Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

Lent is normally a somber, reflective occasion, as we prepare for the joy of the Easter sacrifice and Resurrection. Not normally the time to be telling jokes. But I’m going to be a bit different and start off by telling one. It goes like this:

Jesus is subbing for Peter at the Pearly Gates.

A Roman Catholic dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Catholic says, “Well, the Pope says...” and Jesus says, “No, I wanted your answer. Sorry...”

A Protestant dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Protestant says, “Well, the Bible says...” and Jesus says, “No, I wanted your answer. Sorry...”

An Anglican dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Anglican says, “Well, you are Jesus, the Christ,” Jesus says “Very good!” And the Anglican continues, “...but on the other hand...”

The reason I tell this joke is because it highlights a central aspect of what it means to me to be a Christian: doubt. Gnawing, constant doubt, about everything. We Anglicans tend to question everything, we question authority and don’t take someone else’s word for it. We reject Biblical literalism, just as we reject slavishly following an overmighty Pope or other leader.

This brings with it an advantage, of course, of being liberated from these things. We aren’t burdened with slavishly following Biblical literalism or the latest utterances of Benedict XVI. But if we want to be honest with ourselves, it has a drawback: We are left spending our lives searching for answers, and our belief is constantly being tested and challenged, and thus evolves and changes over our lifetimes. Another old joke goes, ask three Anglicans what they think the Church is, and you’ll get at least five answers. Other Christians may accuse us of building our church on sand, because we as Anglicans or Old Catholics are so reluctant to accept outside authority beyond the barest necessities, and we keep asking questions.

Today’s Old Testament reading contrasts the experience of Israel with our own. Judging from the reading, the Israelites had no doubt that God was there, because He was constantly talking to their prophets and interacting with them directly. God today seems to be harder to spot. We today are plagued by this, constantly searching for evidence that God really loves us, or that God even exists. Bad things happen like the earthquake in Haiti, or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, and our faith is sorely tested. We look for signs of God, and when God doesn’t quite turn out as we expect, we are frustrated and disappointed. Some of us give up entirely, rejecting the whole exercise as a waste of time.

But here, in this doubt, is the seed of our true foundation. It is in this doubt that the rock-solid foundation of our faith lies. Like the singer of the Psalm, we say to God, “You are my refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I put my trust.” We trust in God and places our hopes in Him because our faith is constantly tested by the fire of doubt. We trust Saint Paul when he tells us, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”, and further, that “no one who believes in him will be put to shame”.

The thing is, if one relies on outside authority, that person is be making it too easy for themselves. They are taking a shortcut. That person has to constantly line up daily events or personal experience and see what their authority has to say to them about it. In a sense doing this is not a test of ourselves, but a test of God, to see if God really lives up to what that authority tells us God said. When God fails that test, as He inevitably will, it somehow becomes God’s fault.

But we don’t serve any authority but God Himself, and we certainly have no authority to question or test God, though it is of course tempting to believe that we can. As Jesus told the devil in the Gospel, “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”. And in particular, Jesus admonished the Devil by saying, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” To think that we mere human beings can dare to test God or limit God or make God do what we want Him to do in any way is impossible. It is sheer hubris; it is folly. It is temptation of the Devil himself, who promises us the same false rewards that he promised Jesus. The “reward” of allowing our arrogance to get the better of us and to place ourselves above God is to be enslaved by our worst instincts. The temptation of certainty is what leads people astray to fundamentalism in any form, whether it is Biblical fundamentalism, ultramontane Catholicism, militant atheism or any of the other isms out there. That temptation is as evil as they come, and leads directly to war, conflict and despair.

We must be humble enough to admit that our own worldly authority might get it wrong, or that we ourselves get it wrong. Just as we must not test God by laying claim to infallibility, whether it is of a Pope or of the Bible itself, we must also be very careful not to lay claim to infallibility for our individual selves. It is through the deepest humility and self-denial that we come to experience the real divine presence that is God. Only when we are ready to renounce all preconceptions and preconditions are we ready to experience God directly. We have to play by God’s rules, not our own. Thy will be done.

On a lighter note, Casey Stengel, baseball player and legendary manager of the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, put it in his unique way: “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” We can certainly take that to heart by rephrasing it a little, “Never make assumptions, especially about God.” We have to let God define us and not the other way around, and that is the most important thing about learning how to let our faith grow on its own, rather than succumbing to the temptation of forcing the issue or of taking shortcuts. Thy will be done.

Lent is a time of testing our faith. We prepare ourselves for the triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ at Easter by spending these forty days reflecting on what we believe, and how we came to believe it. This is particularly true for our catechumens, Michelle and Jon, who are working their way towards baptism. Ideally, when we prepare for this, we fast. When we fast, we should do it not just to give up something because someone told us to. Once again that’s just following authority for the sake of following authority. Instead, we should fast because it is a way to strip down our selves to the barest essentials. To remind ourselves that we need nothing but God Himself. To reject the temptation of short-term rewards. To understand that we must be ready to give up anything and everything, just as Jesus gave everything He had when He stretched out His arms on the Cross. Above all, to understand, to see ourselves as part of the greater whole, and our place in it.

When we test our faith in this way, it is tempered, hardened, polished. It becomes something more solid than rock, harder than steel. When we are ready to test our faith to the utmost, to wear our self-doubt willingly, we come to dwell in the shelter of the Most High, and abide under the shadow of the Almighty. When we deny our own pride and hubris, and all pride and hubris around us, the door to God is opened in our hearts and the fire of the Spirit storms in. God can then work through us to save this world of ours. Each of us can become the hand of God working in our world, as an integral part of the body of Christ. It is when we seek rewards least that we gain the greatest reward of all.

When we confess our faults, our fallibility, we come to the point where Paul says in today’s Epistle: “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” This is why Confession is part of each Anglican service: as a reminder to deny ourselves, to accept we are flawed, to accept that only together can we overcome those flaws. We confess our faith together that God is there for us. We come together as a Church to reinforce one another in our faith, to give one another strength on the journey, to leave no one behind. We come together as the Holy Church to make the world new, with God’s help. And that nagging bit of doubt and restlessness, the thirst for knowledge, the will to know God, is the seed in our hearts to help get us to the Kingdom of Heaven itself. And best of all, we know that at the end of Lent, we are ready to personally experience the triumph over death by Jesus Christ in the Easter Vigil, gaining strength from it year after year.

Remember the joke I told at the beginning? It’s true: All you have to do to get into the Kingdom of Heaven is to recognize Jesus for what He is, and do so out of your own heart. Lent is here, so that we can learn to see Jesus all around us, including in ourselves; at the end of Lent, like the disciples at Emmaus, we recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread at Easter, when we come together as one to share – and then the door to the Kingdom of Heaven is wide open, so that we can come into the land that the LORD our God is giving us as an inheritance to possess. Amen.

God the builder: Sermon for Proper 18 (14th Sunday after Pentecost), Year B

Isaiah 35:4-7a, Psalm 146, James 2:1-10,14-17, Mark 7:24-37

The doctrine of »justification« is one that has divided Christians at least since the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent. »Justification« is a theological term that basically defines at what point are we »just« in the eyes of God – that is, when are we fulfilling the Law as God foresaw, when are we being truly faithful in the fullest sense of the term, and when are we free from sin.

Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers, of course, changed the emphasis by insisting on the doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone. The principle of sola fide essentially says that without faith, no amount of good works will save you: Faith in God and Jesus Christ are absolutely necessary for being pardoned of our sinful nature. According to them, works are therefore irrelevant.

The thing is, neither of the two extremes – neither Catholic doctrine of faith and works, nor the Protestant doctrine of sola fide – really manages to tell the whole story as succinctly as today’s readings from the Epistle of St. James and from the Gospel of St. Mark.

In the Epistle, James says point-blank, »What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ›Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,‹ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.«

In the Gospel, we see an example of Jesus living this to the letter. Jesus is of course the Son of God. He is free of sin, and by definition filled with grace – by definition as »justified« as it gets. Yet Jesus spends much of his time healing people and comforting them. Indeed that is the central aspect of His ministry as shown in the New Testament – in a time where there was no such thing as doctors or nurses or clinics or hospitals, where sickness and disease were rampant, Jesus went around making a difference. Jesus didn’t need good works, because Jesus Himself was free of sin – but it was because of His totality of grace that He performed those good works in the first place. The two ideas are absolutely inseparable.

Our good works are the necessary consequence of our faith. When we accept Christ as our Savior, we explicitly recognize our place in the Holy Church of God – that we are part of a communion of believers, but just as importantly members of the human race, itself a gift of God’s creation. God’s power and love permeate all aspects of Creation, and it is by that power that life itself exists and flourishes. It is also that power, that grace, that moves us to be there for our fellow man. A faith that is »strictly personal« is a faith that is totally hollow and without meaning. On the other hand, a faith that moves us to care for the needy and sick, the unemployed and the outcasts, indeed also for those having a crisis of faith themselves – that kind of faith is the sort that truly justifies our existence.

There is another aspect to this that is important, however, and that is the power of prayer. I think many people get confused about what prayer is for and what it’s all about, and what our place is in Creation. When our prayers don’t appear to be answered the way we imagined it, we blame God for not doing as we asked. When things don’t happen as we would like, we get angry with God. Some even turn away from faith entirely – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the statement »I can’t believe in a God that…«

That attitude, however, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what prayer is, and what we are, and why we are here. God did not just create the world for us: God created the world with us and by us. God created us to with the ability to help ourselves. God created us as part of His Creation, as His tools as part of His great plan.

When some people pray, they do so in expectation of some supernatural result. Maybe it’s to ask God’s hand in making sure the right lottery numbers are picked. One imagines the hand of God reaching down and changing the numbers on the balls as they’re drawn out of the bin. But God clearly doesn’t work that way. In the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t say »my will be done«, but »Thy will be done«: we learn to surrender our will to the greater purpose, learning to see that even when things don’t go the way we want, it still all works out in the end. Prayer is the means by which we receive grace. From prayer comes the grace and the inner peace that we need to stop worrying and start doing.

God made us so that we can complete the great plan. Our own fallen nature, our own sinfulness, is the powerful motor that drives us on. We want to do better, we want to change, we want to transform: It’s all part of the human condition.

So when we pray, we do so not to ask God’s invisible hand to do something, but to gain grace and strength from experiencing God to do what we have to do. It is from our faith that we gain entry into that experience of God so that we are motivated to do good works in the first place. We acknowledge our sinfulness, and analyze our mistakes so that we can do better. We open up the gates of our hearts to let God in, and the power of the Holy Spirit fires us on to do more in God’s name. By experiencing God, by tapping into the love of God that permeates our Universe, we experience the totality of humanity. And when we see humanity’s suffering and troubles, we want to make it all better.

The amazing thing is that thanks to God’s grace, we are able to make it all better, even if it takes generations and thousands of years. Not only that, God’s grace is free for the taking – we only have to ask for it in prayer. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, »ask, and you shall receive«. To see the results, one only has to look and see the progress of the last five thousand years of human history. When we do work to change the world for the better, we call that »social justice« – we build a just society. Like James says, »If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.« It is through working for »justice«, by caring for the naked and hungry, that we find »justification«. If faith doesn’t motivate someone to do work for justice, it’s not really faith at all, but rather a kind of idolatry, a distraction from the true path. When we walk that path, we build that world of justice because of our faith. Meanwhile, we can hardly blame God for the state of the world, because it’s our job to change it in the first place.

In the end, what today’s lessons reveal is that each and every one of us plays a part in that great pageant of history, as part of God’s plan. God is like Bob the Builder: God asks us, »can we fix it?« and we reply in faith, »yes we can!«

The revelation is that we are the custodians of Creation. We are the tools of God. By God’s grace, experienced through prayer, we become the hand of God itself. And that is the faith that moves mountains. Amen.