TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: O God of justice and love, you illumine our way through life with the words of your Son. Give us the light we need, and awaken us to the needs of others, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:24.
More than half of U.S. adults believe the United States Constitution is inspired by God, according to a 2022 Faith in America survey released in March by Deseret News and Marist Poll. Even those who do not equate the document with holy writ still maintain that it represents America’s best hope for achieving and maintaining a just and righteous society. When I was admitted to the New Jersey State Bar and that of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, I took an oath to “defend the constitution.” Again, the underlying assumption was that, as the supreme law of the land, the constitution assures our liberties, equal treatment under the law and protection from government oppression. In fact, the constitution does no such thing.
Here are some facts about the constitution that cannot be gainsaid. First, it was a document drafted by wealthy white men. Second, the liberties it secured were principally for wealthy white men. The belief expressed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” meant just that. All men-except slaves who were considered three fourths of a person and that only for determining the number of representatives allowed for each slaveholding state. Women were denied the right to vote in elections until a little more than a century ago. The personal and property rights of indigenous peoples were not included among “all men.” Slavery, patriarchy and genocide lived quite undisturbed under the constitution for centuries. The gains achieved in the areas of civil rights, equal treatment under the law and due process throughout American history have been won through political and legal battles by those determined to expand the scope of the constitution’s protections beyond those contemplated by the “Founding Fathers.” Those opposing them routinely invoked the constitution in opposition to these expansios of legal protection. Thus, when you hear people arguing that the constitution should be interpreted in accord with its “original intent,” they are simply saying that the constitution should be construed to protect the interest of wealthy, white men.
Do you wonder why the United States Congress cannot manage to do what churches, school boards and municipal townships do routinely every day, namely, pass a budget? Do you wonder why a single member of the Senate can hold up military promotions and paralyze whole sections of the defense department? Do you wonder why the majority of the populous favors stronger gun legislation, protection of abortion rights and universal health care, though none of these measures sands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever becoming law? Do you wonder why the people of the United States popularly elected Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, but got George Bush and Donald Trump instead? The answer is that our government was designed to work that way. Our government is designed to make change as difficult and burdensome as possible. A single senator can employ the filibuster to delay or prevent legislation altogether. The requirement that significant legislation needs a supermajority of the Senate paralyzes government when, as currently, both houses of congress are narrowly divided. The procedure for amending the constitution is cumbersome, making fundamental changes sought by a clear majority of the country’s population nearly impossible. In sum, the constitution has created a government that is anti-majoritarian and highly resistant to change. Who benefits most from suppressing change? People who enjoy privilege under the status quo, which are, you guessed it, wealthy, white men.
I am not simply dismissing the American experiment in democracy. I gladly acknowledge that our nation’s founders were brilliant thinkers and courageous leaders who broke new ground in the practice of government that, in turn, made way for unprecedented liberty, justice and opportunity for our nation and for countries throughout the world. For that we owe them a debt of gratitude. But we would be foolish to deny that they were nevertheless people of their age formed by patriarchal, class and white supremacist biases. We would be equally foolish to deny or ignore the ways in which those biases have been built into our system of government and continue to function oppressively. It is the job of prophets, such as our friend Amos, to expose the machinery of injustice in their social environments and, more importantly, to reveal God’s holy alternative, namely, to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
American mainline churches, such as my own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, are typically long on preachy-screechy social statements condemning injustice and calling for reform, but short on reflecting or acting upon those same injustices within their own polity. That is because, historically, we were all founded and financed to a large degree by wealthy white men. The American church as a whole, in all of its diverse denominational forms, is but a social and political microcosm of the nation as a whole. It need not be so. While reshaping American culture might appear to be beyond our ability altogether, reshaping ourselves is clearly not. The Book of Acts gives us a model for what our life together in the Body of Christ might look like:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” Acts 2:44-47.
I am not suggesting that congregations become communes. I maintain, however, that there is much we could do to create equity among pastors and congregations. For example, 20% of the pastors in my church are paid well below the church’s salary guidelines. This reflects, in turn, a substantial number of congregations unable to pay their pastors in accord with those guidelines. From a corporate standpoint, we might say, as did a member of our Board of Pensions two decades ago, that “there are congregations that need to come to grips with the fact that they can’t afford a pastor.” ELCA News, 3/17/2003. Saint Paul had a different view. When the Judean churches were experiencing famine, he spearheaded a drive to collect offerings from his churches throughout the Medetteranean basin to relieve those churches. As he explained it:
“I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.” II Corinthians 8:13-14.
I have served and been a member in small churches for all of my life. I know that, due to a number of factors, many of them are struggling to maintain themselves. I can testify, however, that they are lively, vibrant centers of discipleship and service to their communities. Determining that they are “not sustainable” in terms of what they are capable of paying their pastors and thus unfit for anything but dissolution and/or merger while their assets are absorbed by larger, richer and more “sustainable” congregations is not the way of the gospel. Saint Paul’s approach was precisely the opposite. The abundance of well endowed churches should be shared with those churches that are struggling-and their pastors. Not privilege or right of ownership, but equity within the Body of Christ should control.
Our churches also reflect the contours of our segregated society. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “11 o’clock in Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America.” Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of wealth, resources and opportunities are centered in white churches. There may not be much appetite in the U.S. Congress for considering reparations for these disparities. But there should be no such reluctance within the Body of Christ. I have suggested one way in which our churches might begin the work of reparations leading to genuine unity and reconciliation. See Open Letter to the ELCA Presiding Bishop and Synodical Bishops: A Modest Proposal for Reparational Tithe. Some synods of my church have taken on the important work of making available to persons of color the training, education and exposure to our ministries, thereby preparing them for future leadership. See Jehu Jones Mission-NJ Synod-ELCA. These measures might seem all too small. Still, we have to start somewhere.
Sometimes I think that we suffer from an acute failure of imagination. Nothing changes because we are convinced that nothing can change. We cannot imagine a world different from what we know. We cannot free ourselves from the cultural assumptions about national sovereignty, the sanctity of property rights, the limits of human nature and the necessity of violent state action to achieve peace that shape our world view. The New Testament church was unable to topple the Roman Empire and I doubt that the contemporary church is capable of dismantling single handedly the oppressive structures of oppression in the United States. But, like the ancient church, we can become communities where justice and righteousness are practiced, however imperfectly. I find inspiring communities such as the Bruderhof communities, Reba Place Fellowship and Koinonia Farm. These communities are not necessarily models for what every congregation can or should be. Nevertheless, they spark our imagination, challenge our jaded assumptions and enable us to glimpse in some small measure a day when “justice roll[s] down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Here is a poem by Langston Hughes which I believe expresses the kind of prophetic imagination capable of envisioning justice and righteous, the likes of which the prophet Amos proclaims.
Daybreak in Alabama
When I get to be a colored composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
Touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a colored composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.
Source: Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (c. 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, pub. by Random House, LLC, 1990). Langston Hughes was an important African American voice in the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s. Though well-educated and widely traveled, Hughes’ poetry never strayed far from his roots in the African American community. Early in his career, Hughes’ work was criticized by some African American intellectuals for portraying what they viewed as an unflattering representation of back life. In a response to these critics, Hughes replied, “I didn’t know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren’t people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too.” Today Langston Hughes is recognized globally as a towering literary figure of the 20th Century. You can read more about Hughes and discover more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website (from which the above quote is taken).
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 