Day One.
1.
The highlight of today’s activity at the General Assembly happened at the beginning of the day with a talk by Rev. Liz Theoharis. Theoharis is the the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. She now serves as co-chair with Rev. William Barber II of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Theoharis spoke with understated dignity as she rattled off horrendous and tragic statistic after statistic concerning the situation of poor people in our country today. This is epitomized by the current administration’s godless and inhumane policy of forcibly separating parents and children at the border… and then, adding blasphemy to injury, claiming to be following the Bible in committing such an atrocity. Theoharis wondered allowed what Bible these people are reading. She skimmed over the social justice emphasis that emerges throughout the Scriptures, from Genesis and Deuteronomy, to Jesus and Paul.
She brought the good news of the amazing — and wildly underreported — witness being made by poor people and their supporters all over our country in the past few weeks. She and some of the other people on the stage with her have recently been jailed in protests, experiencing deliberately difficult conditions.
Poor people are subjected to a variety of catch-22 dilemmas, like when they cut off (or severely overcharge for) your family’s water, and then come to take your children away because you have no water. So public school teachers specifically instruct children not to tell them if they have water in their homes because the teachers are legally bound to report it. See how this works? She mentioned several people whom she knows who lost loved ones to completely preventable and treatable diseases, simply because health care in our country is unaffordable to many.
There are 140M poor people in America, 75% of whom are women and children. Fifty percent of the children in this country are poor. And so on. None of this is right or moral
Not to have anger over this is to be a soulless trafficker in human misery.
Theoharis was “proud to be PCUSA” because the denomination has exhibited such a commitment to social justice. It is certainly a plus for us to have her in such a position, next to Barber, whom many consider to be the most important African American leader since Martin Luther King.
Commenting on her book, she said that “God hates poverty and has commanded us to end it.” It is not God, but our own “charity” and hypocrisy that ensure that poverty will always be with us.
2.
I am getting tired of the “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” language clearly being used instead of Trinitarian language. The triune God does indeed create, redeem, and sustain all things. But there is no division of labor in the Godhead, as if only the first hypostasis of the Trinity creates. On the contrary, the Word and Spirit participate in the work of creation. The same goes for God’s redeeming and sustaining. These are things accomplished by the triune God, and should not be delegated to only one hypostasis. The Trinity is one of the central affirmations of Christianity. It is basically a way of talking about how God is inherently love and relational. The distinctions within the Trinity have to do with the character of the relationships between them, not the jobs they supposedly do as individuals. Everything God does, God does as Trinity. It’s not an assembly line.
3.
Our Moderatorial elections continue to be spectacles of self-promotion. At this point this is just part of being a church in American culture, I suppose. I don’t think we know how to do it any other way. In my view, wanting this job should automatically disqualify someone from getting it. As it stands, we have candidates running little “campaigns” for it; “offering themselves” is the least offensive way to spin this.
A lot of our practice here is based on what I suspect is a misunderstanding of the idea of a “call.” In a culture as individualistic as ours, we have this fantasy that a call is something that comes directly from God to an individual, in isolation from their community. Actually, a true call needs not just be ratified or validated by the community somewhere down the line, but needs to come in and through the community from the start. God’s call is horizontal; it comes through others. Its “verticality" is communal, it descends, like the Spirit in Acts 2, on all gathered together. Anyone who imagines God is speaking to them directly and apart from the community probably needs a reality check. I wish we had a tradition of allowing the Moderator to somehow emerge from the body itself, by the power of the Spirit, without people deciding to put themselves forward. But to Americans such a concept is almost beyond imagination.
Another thing we are developing is the practice of having “Co-Moderators.” On the one hand, this mitigates any personality cult focused on a single individual. It also spreads out the workload in what is now a two-year responsibility. It is an example of our willingness to do something imaginative and different.
On the other hand, the practice can sour into a kind of “ticket-balancing,” as Moderatorial candidates seek more votes by teaming up with someone from a different demographic. This kind of scheming can cut both ways. That is, a worthy candidate may be brought down by their partner. Voting for a team can also dilute the message and focus that we have when dealing with single candidates. It remains to be seen how this plays out.
4.
How can we talk about white privilege and racism without ever using the word repentance? The answer has to be more than simply conversation and education. What would repentance look like?
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