HOLY TRINITY
Prayer of the Day: Almighty Creator and ever-living God: we worship your glory, eternal Three-in-One, and we praise your power, majestic One-in-Three. Keep us steadfast in this faith, defend us in all adversity, and bring us at last into your presence, where you live in endless joy and love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:19-20.
The American author, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) once said that “to be good is noble. To teach another to be good is more noble still-and a lot less trouble.” I think of that quote often when I read the bold social justice proclamations by churches like my own. It is all well and good for the church to speak truth to power, to expose, challenge and call for the eradication of systemic racism in government, education and commerce. But when it comes from a church that has been and still is overwhelmingly white, has benefited historically and continues to benefit from white privilege and whose ecclesiastical wealth far exceeds that of most Black churches with which we claim to united-it tends to lack credibility. The cruel, unjust and heartless society we purport to condemn might well throw our own Bible back in our faces with the admonition to “remove the log” from our own eye before attempting to open theirs. Matthew 7:1-5.
In Sunday’s gospel, Jesus utters what we have come to call “the great commission.” He sends his disciples out to “make disciples of all nations.” Well, no he doesn’t. The English translation, “make disciples,” does not capture the meaning conveyed in the original Greek text. Jesus is not commanding his disciples to make the nations into something called disciples. In the Greek, there is no noun, “disciple.” Instead, “disciple” is the verb, the engine of the sentence. Thus, the command is to “disciple all nations.” It involves “teaching them to obey everything” that Jesus has commanded. That is done as much by preaching as example. “Let your light so shine among others that they see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:16. Witness to the nations comes from the heart of a community formed by the Sermon on the Mount. One might call this a community that “practices what it preaches.” But I prefer to say that it is a community whose preaching flows from its faithful practices.
The implication is clear. You have to be a disciple in order to make one. The original disciples became such by following Jesus and the way is no different for us. Churches are to be furnaces in which disciples are formed for witness and service. Our American churches, however, have undergone some formation of their own in a context that makes discipling difficult. Most of us do not view our churches as families into which we are born through baptism. We tend to view them as voluntary organizations of which we are willing members. It is all transactional. I join the church of my choice and receive certain benefits and privileges in return. These include a place to be married and buried; a place to baptize and confirm my kids, a place that offers me some socialization and entertainment. If my church does not give me everything to which I believe I am entitled, or another church down the road offers better preaching, better hymns or better programs, I am out the door. Why should I stay at a church that does not speak to me, that does not meet my needs or comport with my expectations? In accord with our capitalist instincts, we Americans build churches designed to market religious commodities rather than calling people to become fishers for people. Accordingly, our churches produce consumers rather than making disciples. So the question is, how can our churches better become and be disciples of Jesus in our contemporary setting?
I have two thoughts. First, we can become truly diverse. That is particularly important in a society built on a foundation of systemic racism and permeated with hateful ideologies grounded in white supremacy. The rise of Donald Trump and his capture of the Republican party has laid bare the extent and depth of racial hate in our land. The murder of George Floyd and the scandalous disparity in access to medical care and other services between whites and non white citizens have made plain the terrible cost the centuries of racial injustice impose. Diversity is not some trendy new byword. It is at the heart of the good news we proclaim. From its inception, the gospel has been proclaimed as a good word for “the nations” and the church has been understood as made up of “all nations, tribes and tongues.” Never has the need to proclaim in word and deed the common humanity of all people and God’s love for all people been more urgent.
In one sense, we already are diverse. Christians in the United States are heavily represented by almost every ethnicity. Sadly, however, we are divided by denominational loyalties often reflecting the same racial/ethnic fault lines plaguing society as a whole. We tend to seek out and welcome our own kind. We mainliners have been aware of that for decades and have been trying to remedy the malady through intentional outreach to people of color, aggressive recruiting of minority persons for ministry and formulae for ensuring that a certain percentage of our elected leaders are non-white. Yet as well intentioned as these efforts are, they do not address the systemic societal framework of racial discrimination that determines where we live, where we go to school, who we meet, with whom we socialize, what career opportunities are open to us and, yes, where we go to church. Trying to remedy racism by integrating the church is rather like trying to end air pollution by changing your furnace filter.
Yet I believe there is a way out of our ethnic captivity. If we are prepared to acknowledge that the church is a single body as Saint Paul teaches us; if we acknowledge that when one part of the body is injured, the whole body suffers; if we follow Saint Paul’s example in urging his gentile churches to contribute out of their abundance to meet the need of the famine stricken churches of Judea; then it seems to me clear how the wealthier mainline churches, like my own, should respond to the Black churches and missions that are struggling on the front lines against racism and economic injustice. The wealth our national church, synods and congregations have tied up in real estate, sitting in endowments and planted in banks can fuel the fight for racial justice and equity while providing a powerful witness to what the reign of God looks like. I suggested one step in that direction in my “Open Letter to the ELCA Presiding Bishop and Synodical Bishops: A Modest Proposal for Reparational Tithe.” Such action will not desegregate our churches overnight. But it will send a clear message that we mean what we said in our “Declaration Of The ELCA To People Of African Descent.”
I am convinced that remedying the systemic injustice that has and continues to oppress people of color in general and African Americans in particular will require an effort on the level of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan. There is currently little appetite for any such effort in American government and I doubt more screechy preachy church social statements calling for it will alter that disinterest. So perhaps it is time we started to be the change we keep calling for. Maybe it is time for bishops and church leaders to stop acting like CEOs of failing corporations answering to their shareholders, put on their grownup pants and start challenging their churches with concrete proposals for doing with our own assets what we are calling our representatives to do with their constituents’ tax dollars. In the Book of Acts, it was the example of the disciples’ acts of mercy and their selfless lifestyle as much as their preaching that won the hearts of so many to the New Testament church. Who can tell whether the corporate example of a church doing justice within itself will influence the larger society to do likewise?
My second thought is global. As I write this article, Orthodox Christians are daily killing each other by the hundreds in eastern Europe in the bloodiest European conflict since World War II. This is but the most obvious example of an idolatry infecting the church throughout the world. The fact that we are prepared to engage in lethal conflicts pitting Christian against Christian shows that our loyalty to the gods of blood, race, nation and soil takes precedence over out baptismal vows to love our neighbors, near and far, as ourselves. The frightening rise of nationalist/populist movements worldwide has been well documented by the Lutheran World Federation’s study, Resisting Exclusion: Global Theological Responses to Populism, (pub. by Evangelische Verlangsanstalt GmbH, Leipzig, Germany, under the auspices of The Lutheran World Federation). Never has it been more important for the church to assert its catholicity, its claim that ultimate loyalty belongs to Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims and that no nation, government or other human authority must take precedence over the great commandments to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. In a world on the edge of disintegration and global war, the church is called to be the visible sign of Christ’s Body, the Incarnate Word that holds creation together against all the hateful ideologies, nationalistic ambitions and ancient blood feuds threatening to rip it apart.
We need a new ecumenical movement to build a united global church. I understand how difficult that would be and that ecumenism has failed in the past to produce meaningful unity. But I think that is in large part due to our fixation on differences in doctrine and practice. Let me be clear. I believe doctrine is important. I believe discussions about worship, the sacraments, our creeds and ethical concerns are important and worth having. But should they be allowed to get in the way of our common basic assertion that the human family is one and that through the lens of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection there can be no hierarchy of value when it comes to the worth of human lives? And can we credibly make that assertion when our national loyalties trump our loyalty to Jesus and his gentle reign? Do we stand a chance of discipling the nations when we will not disciple ourselves? Can we teach the nations to observe all that Jesus commanded when we ourselves have no intention of following those commands?
I know that these two thoughts of mine are not new, that smarter people than me have articulated them with greater clarity, that better people than me have struggled to bring them to fruition and that the prospects of their taking root now are no greater than in the past. But I can’t help thinking that, perhaps, if enough of us begin loving Jesus and the reign of God he lived and died for more than our institutions, more than our sanctuaries, more than our comfortable traditions, more than our countries, more than life itself-God’s Spirit might once gain make use of us to “turn the world upside down.” See Acts 17:6.
Here is a poem by Denise Levertov about the kind of peacemaking that resembles the discipling I believe our gospel lesson is talking about.
Making Peace
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
Source: Breathing the Water (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987) Denise Levertov (1923–1997) never received a formal education. Nevertheless, she created a highly regarded body of poetry that earned her recognition as one of America’s most respected poets. Her father, Paul Philip Levertov, was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England where he became an Anglican minister. Levertov grew up in a household surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages. During World War II, Levertov pursued nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse at several hospitals in London. Levertov came to the United States in 1948, after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman. During the 1960s Levertov became a staunch critic of the Vietnam war, a topic addressed in many of her poems of that era. Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of seventy-four. You can read more about Denise Levertov and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 