Getting Clear on the Core
One of the crafts that is close to my heart is preaching. This summer, I have been thrilled to get do this, as I have not gotten to since I transitioned out of working in church contexts.
My relationship with Christianity is complicated, so I have let it be a private piece of my life lately. However, I adore the preaching process and would like to share a sermon I preached at Wallingford Presbyterian Church on August 11, 2024 for those of you who find Christianity to be a meaningful resource in life. Those who don't are invited to skip this post or to find what resonates. May this offer something to you like it did to me!
TEXTS
2 Corinthians 5:17-21
“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
James 2:8
“If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well.”
Belhar 5
We believe:
• that God has entrusted the church with the message of reconciliation in and through Jesus Christ;
• that the church is called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that the church is called blessed because it is a peacemaker, that the church is witness both by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells;
• that God’s life-giving Word and Spirit has conquered the powers of sin and death, and therefore also of irreconciliation and hatred, bitterness and enmity, that God’s life-giving Word and Spirit will enable the church to live in a new obedience which can open new possibilities of life for society and the world;
• that the credibility of this message is seriously affected and its beneficial work obstructed when it is proclaimed in a land which professes to be Christian, but in which the enforced separation of people on a racial basis promotes and perpetuates alienation, hatred and enmity;
• that any teaching which attempts to legitimate such forced separation by appeal to the gospel, and is not prepared to venture on the road of obedience and reconciliation, but rather, out of prejudice, fear, selfishness and unbelief, denies in advance the reconciling power of the gospel, must be considered ideology and false doctrine.
SERMON
Hello! I so wish I could be with you all in-person, but unfortunately I have COVID, so I’m preaching today through Zoom.
For any who are new to this summer sermon series on White Christian Nationalism, we have been reflecting for the past few weeks on the Belhar Confession: a statement of faith written in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. The Dutch colonizers had come up with distinct races and established a rigid and violent system which separated them and maintained the power of these white settlers. Christian scriptures were used to justify this; we learned in July that the Genesis story of God separating the light from the dark was held as evidence that the apartheid system was faithfulness to God’s will. The Dutch racially split their Reformed Church into two branches, and the Dutch Reformed Mission Church – comprised of black and mixed-race South Africans – wrote the Belhar Confession. It beautifully condemns separation and the use of the gospel to support injustice, and it flips the Dutch colonial theology on its head.
These are two VERY different understandings of what it means to be Christian. Even the interpretation of one word, one story, was tied to a difference so stark as apartheid vs. equity.
[How we interpret the words of scripture] and [how we articulate the truth] are often themes of disagreements about what Christianity is; that was certainly the case in South Africa. In today’s reading from the Belhar Confession, the word “separation” particularly stuck out to me since I am home quarantining with my COVID. Belhar firmly declares separation to be wrong, but what about social distancing? If we take this text literally — which some may call taking it “seriously” — we may conclude that it is wrong to stay home when sick. But remaining in others’ company surely is not unifying if it means risking their lives. We know that there are [the words we find in a particular moment to describe what is true and good] and then there is [the heart behind the words]. And that heart is always: “I want you to be well”. We call this love.
Powerful groups through the ages have used Christianity to support a great many injustices, holding up various biblical texts as so-called proof that God demands their particular method of maintaining power. And when these people get to control the conversations, making the gospel out to be a confusing matter of biblical interpretation or lack thereof, they convince plenty of not-so-powerful people along the way that Christianity is about domination.
CONFLICTING CONCEPTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY
Contradictory understandings of words, especially the words of deeply held values and of scripture texts, are certainly not just a thing of the past. Getting clear on [the heart behind the words] of our faith is as important as ever today as White Christian Nationalism is on the rise. The values of this ideology are full of contradictions, which we can notice in the recently released “Project 2025”.
Also called the “Mandate for Leadership”, Project 2025 is a collection of policy proposals put forth by a think tank called the Heritage Foundation. The Washington Post described the plan as calling for "infusing Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy". This massive document lays out a vision of an America rooted in ““Christian Values””. Note the heavy-handed air quotes. Here is an overview of Project 2025:
Anti-immigration
Thoroughly restrict immigration, even of trafficking victims
Mass deportations
Withhold disaster relief funds to state or local governments that do not comply with immigration policy — even just sharing information with law enforcement
Deploying the military domestically to enforce laws and immigration stuff
Increase executions
Prioritize the economy over people and planet
End research and policies on climate change (e.g. stop curbing emissions)
Cut Medicare and Medicaid
Increasing nuclear weapons
Deny food stamps for the unemployed
Cut funding for free school lunches and eliminate services for children of low-income families
“Biblically-based” definition of marriage and family.
End queer marriage
End access to trans gender-affirming care and the morning-after pill
Require reproductive care clinics to encourage potential single parents toward marriage
End anti-discrimination policies and categories of diversity in gender and sexual orientation
And this is all in the name of Christianity.
CALLING MANY THINGS “CHRISTIAN”: A HISTORY
Political powers throughout history and today have used theology to force injustices by twisting the words of the sacred, wringing out the heart of the words, and using them to say that God promotes domination.
During the days of the New Testament, the Roman Empire would announce that it was “Good News” / “Gospel” when its military arrived in new lands, taking over through violence and domination; but Jesus reminded his occupied peers what actual good news is: that God wants us to be well, and is here to do just that.
In the US, pastors preached from pulpits that chattel slavery and the genocide of native peoples and their cultures were Christian acts. From pastors to politicians, people used words of scripture and theology to say that these horrors were good news for peoples that they called “savage”, “violent”, and “uncivilized”. But domination is never good news.
We’ve been learning in this series about Nazi Germany and Dutch apartheid in South Africa – both of which were inspired by US Jim Crow policies – and both of which called their violent, disenfranchising domination biblical. And yet, the two most consistent calls in scripture are 1) worship only god and 2) do justice.
White Christian Nationalism today is leading predictor of prioritizing the economy and deprioritizing the vulnerable, second-leading predictor of prioritizing individual liberty. Not religiosity, not political party affiliation, not christian denomination or subculture. Christian Nationalism. But the biblical story describes a God who always prioritizes the vulnerable and who calls communities to do so as well.
Christianity can be used to justify anything if we forget the heart behind the words.
DEFINING AND LIVING CLARITY AMID CONTRADICTING CHRISTIANITIES
Today’s verses from James 2 highlight the need to remember the heart behind the words, the core of God’s message to us, the essence of Christianity: love.
There is an essential need for simplicity and clarity. A similar truth is offered in Micah 6:8: “This is what the Lord requires of you: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God”. The heart of all Christian values, of all of scripture – even the contradicting parts – is love.
Yet, even if we don’t forget that love is the core of our faith, dominating powers will always make “love” out to be so abstract that it could mean anything, so we have to get clear on what LOVE is.
Love is about wellbeing, mutual care, and flourishing. It is spiritual and emotional, but also tangible and embodied. It has visible effects. Love says “I want you to be well.”
The late Black feminist theorist, professor, and author bell hooks was also interested in getting clear on what exactly "love" is. She wrote about this in a book titled “all about love”. It’s an amazing book – I would love to just sit here and read you the whole thing. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for that, but I do think she can help us to get clear on what love is.
hooks uses M. Scott Peck’s definition of love: ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’” and adds that “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
Throughout the book, hooks refines and illustrates a vivid picture of what actual love looks like when these ingredients are present, and she also makes clear that love cannot co-exist with domination, whether on the interpersonal level or the systemic. She writes that “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”
bell hooks can also help us understand the confusing contradictions present within White Christian Nationalism. She observes that “Many of our nation’s citizens are afraid to embrace an ethics of compassion because it threatens their security. Brainwashed to believe that they can only be secure if they have more than the next person...”
And this is where she really brings it home: “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience…. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation.” OOH!!
Amid powerful contradictions about what Christianity and love are – brought on by the combination of domination and fear – we need to find and practice clarity, to live the heart of the gospel so faithfully that we become un-trickable.
This is what faithful lovers of spirit and life have done throughout time; they have seen through the deceit of the powerful, rooted themselves collectively in love, and refused to participate in injustices that were being labeled as good, right, loving, gospel.
The authors of the book of James and the Belhar Confession teach us that the core of our faith is to love your neighbor, to support their wellbeing. That anything else is not the true Way.
CHRISTIAN ENGAGEMENT WITH POLITICS (SANS NATIONALISM)
White Christian Nationalism conflates American and Christian identities, but to merge Christian identity with the state — any state — is to merge our faith with power-over. With domination. And bell hooks has taught us that the harm that domination does makes it incompatible with love.
It makes sense that the central message of the Christian faith keeps getting twisted. The institution of Christianity was seized by power less than 400 years after the life of Jesus to be used and shaped as both a tool and justification for domination. So we, 2000 years later, do not know a Christianity that is entirely untouched by the ideologies of empire, coloniality, and nationalism. There is much to grieve there. And yet we can imagine and co-create Christ-like communities for this day by returning to the heart of our faith, which is love. Which is mutual care. Which is contribution to the flourishing well-being of all living beings. Not through domination and force, but through tangible, generous care.
We have given attention to examples of injustices that have from from religious mingling with politics, so I also want to say this:
There is a big difference between [letting one’s Christian values guide political engagement] and [enforcing religious practice using political power]. It can be hard to distinguish these — unless we remember that the heart of our faith is loving care.
The word “politics” is a sort of bad word to many in the US. It is understandable, considering that our frame of reference is a political arena in which power becomes increasingly concentrated among the few and is used both locally and globally to extract resources, expand control, surveil behavior, and to punish. However, “politics” are simply meant to be one way that we try to co-create communities that support everyone’s wellbeing.
Justin McRoberts captures that posture beautifully in this poem:
“May I learn to love
the people in my country
more than I love
the idea of it.”
May we embody these words.
CHRISTIANITY AS LOVE: FROM COGNITIVE TO EMBODIED
So, getting clear on definitions and being untrickable in our love is important. I’m going to complicate this a little though. Sorry!
Earlier I shared bell hooks’ insight that “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience”. I want to explore that idea of fear together for two reasons:
1st is so that we don’t fall into thinking we are inherently better than anyone who is more indoctrinated into domination than we are,
and 2nd is to bring the concept closer to home so that we can find our entry points to the healing that is so badly needed.
I want to pose that when we love a concept more than a living being it is because we are afraid.
A study called “Christian nationalism, religious struggles, and the structural amplification of emotional distress” by Laura Upenieks and Terrence D. Hill found that “Christian nationalists exhibit higher levels of anger, depression, anxiety, and emotional distress.” Upenieks and Hill write that “Christian nationalism is characterized by fear of ‘the other’ (e.g., immigrants, racial minorities, and sexual minorities) and the imagined consequences of straying from traditional Christian values.”
Social worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, and author Resmaa Menakem helps us understand this in his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, which I also want to read you the entirety of.
Menakem writes of white supremacy that “only a fraction of it exists in our cognitive brains. For the most part, white supremacy lives in our bodies.” He goes on to say that “Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness…. wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous.”
And he adds the following, which I find important for this subject of White Christian Nationalism: “Remember that dangerous can mean a threat to more than just the well being of our body. It can mean a threat to what we do, say, think, care about, believe in, or yearn for.”
Menakem’s writings are so important because White Christian Nationalism is more than just an ideology: it is a lived experience held within bodies. In our Protestant context, our Western context, we tend to understand things in terms of the mind. But the social wounds that we grieve and paths toward their healing are primarily embodied, not mental. As we consider the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, individualism, etc. that are growing in our nation and world, I want to share Resmaa Menakem’s account of American history through the lens of trauma in the body. These excerpts are a little dense, but I think they’re important, so I will read slowly to allow time to process the words. Let’s take a deep breath together to make space to hear this.
inhale… exhale…
“Many of the English who colonized America had been brutalized or had witnessed great brutality first-hand. Others were the children and grandchildren of people who had experienced such savagery in England.”
“Here is what we need to recognize about this New world murder, cruelty, oppression, and torture: until the second half of the seventeenth century, these traumas were inflicted primarily on white bodies by other white bodies.”
“It was only in the late seventeenth century that white Americans began in earnest to formalize a culture of white-body supremacy in order to soothe the dissonance that existed between more powerful and less powerful white bodies; to blow centuries of white-on-white trauma through millions of Black and red bodies…. [t]he phantasm of race was conjured to help white people manage their fear and hatred of other white people.”
“[to soothe] some of the long-held pain passed down from generation to generation in white bodies…”
“Trying to soothe trauma by blowing it through other human beings provides no healing. It offers only temporary relief from… pain. Meanwhile, in the process, it both increases the pain and passes it on to others.”
I’m going to read that last part again.
“Trying to soothe trauma by blowing it through other human beings provides no healing. It offers only temporary relief from… pain. Meanwhile, in the process, it both increases the pain and passes it on to others.”
What we are seeing in our nation today is [domination as a way to cope with fear – fear that has been passed down both consciously and unconsciously]; and all in the name of the gospel.
This same story [of pain being passed on instead of processed] is playing out all over the world. We have been discussing South Africa’s history of apartheid, while just a few weeks ago the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestine qualifies as apartheid. Ten months of genocide in Gaza and over 70 years of occupation, forced migration, and apartheid of Palestinians make sense if we consider the horrific, generational memory of genocide that lives in the bodies of Israel’s citizens. Activists with Jewish Voice for Peace protest this genocide with the words “Not in our name”, reminding us that trauma is not meant to be passed on to others. Especially in the name of religion.
Understanding how the fear response can take over can help us to have empathy for others and ourselves, see more clearly amid contradictions, and find embodied ways to move toward genuine loving care.
No matter how clear we get about the core of the gospel, we can’t convince people to love. And we ourselves cannot live that love how we’d like to if we run from fear and pain.
Menakem writes that “Most forms of dialogue, diversity training, and other cognitive interventions are going to have little effect on this reflexive fear response, because the body has been trained to respond in this noncognitive way.” For those who want to love well, he offers this path forward: “The place to begin the all-important healing of trauma is with the body. Your body…. Healing can ripple outward from one body to another.”
EMBODIED WOUNDS, EMBODIED HEALING
Practicing clarity, remembering love as the heart of truth, and knowing deeply that our well-beings are interdependent: these are things we do with our bodies – by practicing loving care! By loving others and ourselves! By taking time to feel! By creating spaces where nobody needs to be afraid!
In South Africa, loving justice was pursued with thoughts and words like in the Belhar Confession, but also with bodies. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a piece of how South Africa worked to move through the pain after apartheid ended rather than running away from it and inevitably letting it grow. Rather than prioritizing punishment, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission prioritized communal honesty and grief. Those harmed were able to directly share their stories and those who caused harm had the chance to honestly confess.
I am struck by how embodied this is. This offered a shared space to sit with sadness, shame, and guilt – to feel these – and also to feel grief. Letting these move through and between bodies instead of getting stuck, avoided, and passed on. Now South Africa is leading the International Court of Justice in charging Israel with genocide and apartheid of Palestinians. In seeing the truth through the lies. In loving pursuit of wellbeing for all people.
LIVING CHRISTIAN LOVE
In the US today, we will not attain wellbeing by eliminating the White Christian Nationalists in our midst in the same way that they attempt to eliminate those they fear. Our gospel invitation is to seek the well-being of all living beings, even if they don’t seek ours. Resmaa Menakem writes that “The [body] is… also where we feel a sense of belonging…. Beneath all the exclusion and constriction and trauma, white-body supremacy offers the white body a sense of belonging…. We will not end white-body supremacy – or any form of human evil – by trying to tear it to pieces. Instead, we can offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to.” How beautiful can our communities become? What is the most loving world we can imagine, and how can we begin to create it in our homes, our communities, our city? In our relationship with our own self?
We will continue to encounter lies rooted in fear and domination. We will continue to encounter false ideas about what Christianity is. And yet, in our own communities, we know people who are rooted in the truth and are bravely healing their wounds; their settled bodies and their capacities for generous love ripple outward and change us. We each can practice love that ripples outward and spreads healing in intentional ways and in ways beyond what we can imagine. Our beautiful inward/outward faith reminds us that the divine spirit of Love is always present for us to drop into – to be strengthened, healed, and guided by; we have the life and teachings of Jesus as our guiding light on the path of love; and we have this community, this space, where each week we remind one another of the gospel of love, the divine invitation to build worlds where we can all flourish. I treasure what is being built here at Wallingford Presbyterian Church and I can’t wait for us to keep building in love and watch it ripple outward.
BENEDICTION
Friends, I want us to be well. May we be un-trickably rooted in the truth of love, receiving and sharing it not only with our minds but with our bodies too. May the source of love – our creator, redeemer, and sustainer – be with you always, within us and between us. Go in peace.
