Day Five.
1.
I got up early on Wednesday to attend the Peace Breakfast, an event which has been happening at GA for decades. No one really knows how long. The Peace Fellowship has been around since 1944, though. I have attended this one every time I have been to GA. When I started I would sometimes note that I was the youngest person in the room… and I was like 40 something.
This morning I was among the oldest, not just because I have aged, but the room was packed with people in their 20s and 30s. It was full of good energy, faithful intelligence, brave imagination, and profound love. What used to be a sleepy, aging, pacifist ghetto, is now near the center of our denominational life.
We gave an award to Rev. Abby Mohaupt, a young pastor who leads a group called Fossil Free PCUSA. And we heard an incandescent barn-burner of a sermon from former co-Moderator Rev. Denise Anderson.
As her preaching was washing over and through us, it occurred to me that this is what it must have been like in the first century church, with preachers and “prophets” railing against Roman oppression and offering the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the redemptive answer of God to the suffering of the people. The earliest church, of course, had no New Testament, no set theology, and no detailed doctrinal consensus. They wouldn’t even have had much Scripture at all. What they had was the good news of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah who had been executed for sedition by Rome, who nevertheless did not stay dead, but continued to live in and among his disciples by God’s Spirit. This is the core message the church had. This is how the church grew.
But if people are not sharing a common bad experience of the predatory and extractive Empire, if indeed people are enjoying privilege and power in that Empire, such a message is not going to inspire hope, but fear: fear of losing the status, stability, safety, and security that accompany loyalty to the Empire.
The Lord Jesus would have us identify with the members of the oppressed ethne, the nations conquered by Rome. If we don’t understand ourselves to be among the disenfranchised, defeated, disinherited, discredited, and discarded, the gospel is not going to make much sense to us. We would have to invent a different gospel, one that privileges the wealthy and powerful, and can be pressed into service in the name of social stability and enforcing the economic and political status quo.
2.
The highlight of the afternoon plenary session was the beginning of the long process to include Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” in our Book of Confessions. We want to place such courageous words at the core of our identity, and this is a very good thing. We had the obligatory debate about whether this is formally a confession or something else, and whether it should be in a different category, but still in the book. I heard no argument against including it somewhere and somehow. In the end, they left it up to the regular process we invoke for such documents, which is careful and lengthy.
3.
One of the frustrating things about General Assembly is the propensity for making grandiose pronunciamentos about the issues of the day, which sound really good, but have very little traction in our actual life. At worst, they purport to instruct the government about what to do, while ignoring the fact that the church itself continues to do the very same things. (Plus, the government, especially the current one, is long past caring what we think about anything.)
Today the assembly approved high-sounding words once again rejecting The Doctrine of Discovery, the 15th century declaration by one of the worst Popes ever about how Europeans could carve up the newly discovered lands in the Western Hemisphere as they saw fit. The Doctrine continues to be legal precedent in the USA, which should surprise no one. The Doctrine of Discovery is truly execrable and evil; rejecting it is something we should have done centuries ago. But it didn’t even occur to us until recently.
I doubt if we are fully aware of the consequences of rejecting it. We will see this tomorrow when the assembly will affirm its actual participation in the Doctrine by a rather large majority. So we reject it verbally, but we are fine with continuing to propagate it and especially profit from it.
We are failing to realize the pervasiveness of The Doctrine of Discovery as the very foundation of our whole nation and economy. Like true Protestants, we assume that because we say something we have actually done something.
What about land stolen from Native peoples? What about the resources within and under that land? This has to be more than simply proclaiming that the Doctrine was a Bad Thing. We continue to enjoy the benefits, and others continue to suffer the liabilities, of this legal atrocity. This assembly will have opportunity to put some teeth in its rejection of this Doctrine. It will fail to do so. It will take the money instead.
+++++++
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