Give up "Christian Supremacy" for Lent
Does Christianity have to be the only game in town for it to be anything worthwhile? Or can Christianity be a distinct, important contribution to the world — worth giving your life to — AND other world religions also have truthful, ultimate things to offer the world too?
SPEAKER NOTES
Give up Christian Supremacy for Lent
Story
I want to start with a memorable story from my life — some of you may have heard me tell it before…
- S - I was dropping off my son at a neighbor’s home daycare, like any Wednesday,
- T - but this was the day after Trump won in 2016, and I remember being in disbelief and fear (and some shame, because I’d told many friends more worried than me it couldn’t happen)
- A - Muna and I exchanged our usual how are you’s, and I sighed deeply and said “today is heavy”
- (Muna and her family are Muslim, and I knew without asking were hurt by Trump’s rhetoric)
- she sighed as well and then we said goodbye
- R - when I picked up my son at the end of that work day, Keziah my wife was already there, and I walk in and she and Muna are in tears together and hugging,
- and Muna said to me “I’m so glad you said what you said this morning, because I just didn’t know; I just didn’t know”
- C - I could know without asking how she felt that morning, but she couldn’t know about me — the family of the boy she watched, whose dad is a white pastor of a Church — when the vast majority of white Christian males voted for Trump in 2016 — we had all the power in that situation because of our religious background and race — and it was such a relief to her to find out she didn’t have to tip toe around us or pretend.
- That was a window for us into the experience of Christian supremacy for someone who is not a Christian
- AND it also solidified my negative feelings toward Christian Supremacy as a Christian, because that was an incredibly uncomfortable experience for me to realize Muna wasn’t sure how to see me.
- No one wants to be seen as supremacist.
- But is that just part of the fine print of being a committed person of faith?
- Hopefully by the end of this morning, you don’t think so.
Context
- So we’re continuing our theme for Lent (these 40 days that lead up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday)
- Jumping off of the tradition of giving things up for Lent… like chocolate or screen time
- We are giving up unhelpful and incomplete beliefs for Lent… but NOT going back to them, like chocolate
- Instead, we are constructing alternative beliefs in their place
- Today, the question we’re exploring is:
- Can Christianity be a distinct, vital contribution to the world, of ultimate importance, worth giving your life to (even your death to) AND can other world religious expressions and traditions also have truthful, distinct, ultimate things to offer the world too?
- Or are those mutually exclusive?
- Does Christianity have to be the only true religion for it to be anything worthwhile?
Unhelpful
- This is what popular discussion of religion today assumes. That religion is a zero sum game: only one can win.
- It’s EITHER Christian salvation OR Buddhist Enlightenment
- You support EITHER Hindu India OR Muslim Bangladesh
- EITHER Allah of the Quran OR Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible
- And oh the violence that this all stokes
- We have Netanyahu right now unable to see the voice of the victim in his own scriptures, and instead patting himself on the back for creating thousands more victims
- Even inside these traditions, conflict breaks out
- EITHER Sunni Muslim OR Shi’ite Muslim
- EITHER Catholic OR Protestant (and within Protestantism… oh boy!)
- We don’t need to be convinced of the constant possibility of violence.
- AND, if it’s a zero sum game with only one winner, then it’s also important to note power imbalances are a part of all of these struggles too.
- And that’s why we’re not just talking about “religious conflict” as though everyone is essentially on the same footing,
- We’re talking about “Christian supremacy” ==(SLIDE)== in particular as something that needs to be acknowledged as a global reality —
- most of the power and money and military might in the world resides with Christians.
- Christian supremacy overlaps with other supremacies in our world —
- white supremacy,
- euro-American supremacy,
- male supremacy
- I remember attending a lecture by Korean-American theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim,
- and she pointed out how, in her world in the academy, no one bats an eye when scholars use Greek or Latin concepts like “Spirit” to talk about Jesus,
- BUT when she uses Korean concepts “chi” or “han” from her heritage to talk about Jesus she is accused of pushing too far beyond “normal Christianity”.
- That’s Christian supremacy overlapping with other supremacies.
Better but incomplete
- And so, to combat supremacies, people of good will all over the world — throughout history but especially since WWII, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the nuclear bomb — have been searching for ways to maintain a pluralist reality — meaning a viable co-existence of our many (or plurality of) beliefs
- (That’s good news! Social media can make it feel like no progress has ever been made or will ever be made in anything, but that’s not true.)
- Now, if you grew up more steeped in Christian Supremacy, chances are "Pluralism" was considered a bad word:
- that it cheapens Jesus’ claim that he is the way the truth and the life in John 14
- We want to be clear that we don’t agree at BLC.
- BUT neither are we giving up on Jesus’ claim to be the way the truth and the life
- Maybe that sounds impossible or paradoxical?
- If so, awesome. Because I love paradoxes! That’s where the good stuff of life is.
- So...
- I’m using “pluralism” as a good and necessary word today, as an antidote to Christian supremacy,
- AND I believe I can still fully say that Jesus is the way the truth and the life at the same time.
- How on earth? (You might ask.)
- The “how” is in the difference between a surface pluralism and a deep pluralism
- Let’s talk about a surface pluralism first ==(SLIDE)==
- which is this week’s “better, but incomplete” belief
- it is probably the default position of most of us in a place like Chicago
- A surface pluralism says: we’re all climbing the same mountain, but different paths up that mountain
- There’s an ultimate truth we’re all climbing to reach, and our paths represent the different religious expressions and traditions through which we climb
- Huge improvement over Christian supremacy, right?
- It seems to evade a lot of the dangers we just talked about
- So this is NOT bad, even though I’m calling it incomplete;
- It’s a totally normal way that we reflect our wider culture’s progress in moving beyond supremacy.
- I think of “coexist” bumper stickers I saw everywhere growing up in Chicago and Evanston
- BUT like many auto-pilot positions in any culture, if you dig a little deeper, there are some problems.
- Because while this is generous in a way that it says: “Christian Salvation”, “Buddhist Enlightenment” — potato, pot-ah-to — they’re all the same, right? We should just be able to coexist!
- It can also be kind of arrogant in that same way — is it really that simple to just coexist?
- Easy to say coming from a Christianized perspective
- But do you have any non-Christian friends? Do they agree?
- There’s a papering over of distinctiveness there that still privileges Christianity.
- A good parallel is race relations in America.
- I remember a BLC discussion group seven or eight years ago that a friend in our church led on racial identity and race relations.
- It was where I first learned that there’s a name for the kool-aid I drank growing up in racially diverse Evanston, Illinois, where we fashioned ourselves progressive and forward thinking but deep down had just as much racial conflict as anywhere else in America.
- We would give off the vibe of “I don’t see color” — we just see human beings
- It’s such a classic blunder in race relations scholars have a name for it: it’s called colorblindness, and it doesn’t work to help race relations, because it papers over the distinctiveness of marginalized experiences, rather than seeks to honor them
- Hayley, our connections pastor, a while back, made the connection for me to our topic today: surface pluralism is the religious version of “I don’t see color”: “I don’t see religion”.
Interlude on Economism
- A second issue with a “surface” pluralism is that it, by definition, suggests that anyone who is part of a religious tradition or expression should stay on the surface of that tradition or expression
- And this produces a shallow faith
- Now Christian Supremacist settings like to point this out too
- But, unlike them, my issue with a shallow faith is NOT that God needs our defending from devotion that isn’t good enough
- (My sense is that God is not so defensive and needy)
- My issue is different… let me explain:
- Some philosophers wonder if, in the long term, there is no such thing as surface devotion for humans.
- That, one way or another, human beings worship,
- And so, if people in the West like us are keeping religion at arm’s length in an effort to avoid Christian supremacy, that has some good benefits, BUT we have to be aware that something else will take religion’s place as the object of our devotion.
- Because maybe everyone worships. It’s not an option to not worship.
- And, if that’s the case, what becomes the default for worship in our secular age?
- The Market.
- We exchange God for the Invisible Hand of the Market,
- Did you ever learn this phrase in school? The invisible hand?
- It’s a core component to free market capitalism, the underpinning of our secular “post-religious” society, and yet it couldn’t sound more strangely devotional, or even cult-like, right?
- The invisible hand of the market will take care of everything if we leave it alone and don’t regulate it. It will sort out justice and inequality, just leave it alone and don’t get in its way.
- That’s worship language!
- The invisible hand’s religious-like grip on us is so insidious we don’t even realize it.
- We are assured of our salvation by savings accounts and insurance policies
- Our sacraments are
- go to school,
- get a career,
- buy lots of stuff,
- and retire
- Our confession booth is social media where we demonstrate our good deeds of productivity and performance
- The Market can indeed feel like an exhausting religion with a cruel god demanding worship and sacrifice
- And the ethic of such a god and religion will always come back to profit, not love.
- We can dress up profit however we want, but it’s not meant to be an ethical foundation —
- it’s too cold, too unfeeling.
- In service of an ethic of love, money can be a great asset,
- But as an ethic itself, it can’t stand.
- Global profits of companies and country GDPs are booming more than ever and continue to grow, but billions of people all over the world including here in America still experience economic depression
- New Testament scholar Dom Crossan says: Ask not whether the economy booms? Ask for whom it booms?
- I am very compelled by the suggestion some theologians today make that: the most adhered to global religion today is “Economism”.
- You know Jesus did present a binary about worship in his teachings, but it wasn’t against other religions of his day;
- it was against “Mammon”, the old timey word for riches.
- “You can’t serve both God and Mammon.” (Matthew 6, Luke 16)
- If Jesus is right, then that explains another big reason why a surface-level pluralism in our context is incomplete:
- because we’re in danger of exchanging Christian supremacy for the supremacy of the Market,
- and that has escalated human violence and exploitation even more
Deep pluralism
- So I suggested that there is another kind of pluralism.
- What is a deep pluralism? ==(SLIDE)==
- I want to give us two images to explain…
Parable of the Weeds
The first one is from Jesus (in Matthew 13 in the Bible) ==(SLIDE)==
24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
(This is one of the absolute best lines in the whole Bible to take out of context… try it with your partner or roommate: Why are their so many dirty dishes in the sink?… “An enemy did this”)“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
29 “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”
Jesus’ point is: We humans are not trustworthy to weed the field.
Not trustworthy to be deciding “who’s in” or “who’s out” in some eternal sense.
Even though we REALLY want to… “Let us pull these weeds up for you God! Take a load off; we got this!”
No, Jesus says. That’s a job for a God of perfect love and justice. Not fallible, limited humans.
What’s our job? Till the soil; deepen the roots of the good seed.
Hold that in mind, and let me offer a second image ==(SLIDE)==
Many mountains, each with many paths
- This one is from contemporary theologians
- Remember the mountain image for a surface pluralism that was good in some ways, but incomplete in others because it collapses our differences, rather than honors them?
- A deep pluralism says:
- What if there are many mountains, each with many paths? ==(SLIDE)==
- What if there are multiple ultimate truths human beings strive for in our efforts to live meaningful, purposeful, loving, resilient lives?
- Setting aside the worst tribal versions of our various world religious expressions and traditions, obviously…
- What if the best versions of them each distinctly contribute to our larger human project?
- Because we’re each excellent guides up different mountains that need to be summited?
- For us, here in a Christian church, the world needs our expertise on climbing the mountain of Personal Divine Love, as imaged in Jesus’ way, truth, and life
- But the world also needs the expertise of the Buddhist on climbing the mountain of Non-Personal Reality and radical acceptance and one-ness with the universe
- And then there are other mountains too.
- And there are multiple paths up our Christian mountain, not just the path BLC would take! ==(SLIDE)==
- What these images recommend is not a pluralism built on surface engagement with our religious expressions and traditions… but a pluralism built on deep engagement with our religious expressions and traditions.
- It’s paradoxical but true! And we know this!
- Again, think of race relations efforts.
- I mentioned that BLC small group on racial identity I learned so much in
- Years later, I remember feeling so much freedom when a workshop on anti-racism taught me that becoming anti-racist doesn’t mean I first have to read every book on the matter and become an eloquent expert on every racial identity in the world.
- Rather, this workshop taught me, the first step to becoming anti-racist is a deeper engagement of and awareness about my own racial identity — what it means to be of European descent, the values and experiences of my white-skinned German and Italian ancestors
- Then I can better engage and become aware about other people’s racial identities and experiences, different from my own
- Light bulb moment! So helpful!
- It's the same way with religion. The people who truly know their own roots are humble about them! They aren’t the most tribal, they’re the ones who most live out love of neighbor.
- Again, think of race relations efforts.
- And that doesn’t lead them to see all things as the same, like a surface pluralism. This helps them see unique contributions.
- I can’t speak for other traditions, but I can speak for BLC’s open and relational Christianity, and I LOVE what we distinctly contribute - I am giving my life to it:
- a personal God who is beyond us and yet within us moment to moment by the Spirit at the same time,
- a God who suffers with us, like Jesus, rather than is removed from us in some timeless throne room
- self-sacrificial love, that includes your enemy, as a way to end cycles of revenge,
- a commitment to the hope that resurrection comes after death
- What sort of things do you see that is worth getting rooted in?
- For most of us here this will be predominately engagement with some Christian tradition or another.
- But it might be other traditions too based on our culture or experiences or situation
- Lay down some roots!
- That’s the first step to expanding your curiosity and respect for others’ traditions and expressions - getting rooted in your own!
- If life is many mountains, each with many paths,
- we can see those on other paths and summits better ONLY as we climb higher on our mountain path.
- And if life is a field, and we are not trustworthy to be trying to identify and pull up weeds,
- then let’s focus on tilling the soil and keeping the plants deepening their roots.
- What a beautiful calling! ==(SLIDE)==
Practical
- So I want to give an impassioned plea once again for BLC’s Lent mealtime prayers - for friends, families, and roommates to share together ==(STILL)==
- Every Sunday of Lent we’re releasing them, and also Good Friday.
- Even if you start today, and didn’t do the others
- Again, maybe, one way or another, day in day out, we are all worshipping, we are all engaging in devotion
- So we want to help you direct your devotion intentionally,
- so the Market doesn’t absorb it by default
- If you’ve never had prayer with others modeled for you in the past, or you have but those models have felt supremacist to you, that’s why we made these!
- You don’t have to keep religion at arm’s length to be a someone who is generous to all people and all religions;
- deepening your roots, climbing higher on the mountain you find yourself is a better way
- Deep engagement, not surface engagement. ==(STILL OFF)==
Let’s Pray…