"Kin-dom."

Without God, everything is permitted.

— Dostoyevsky

It has become customary in some church circles to replace the word “kingdom” with “kin-dom,” to emphasize our shared relational matrix as co-siblings in Christ.  I get that.  And I agree, mostly.  Seen horizontally, we are all equal before God.  There should be no castes or pecking orders, no superiors and subordinates, no insiders and outsiders.  All are included, accepted, and welcome.  We are all made in the Image of God.  We are all therefore kin, which is to say, of one family of humanity and creation.

I suspect many also feel some frustration with the term “kingdom.”  The word has a history of being used to justify and prop up earthly royalty and, by extension, the hegemony of rich, white, males.  That is reprehensible and toxic to community and faith. 

But “kin-dom” is not an accurate translation of the Greek word in the New Testament, basileia, which denotes the realm of a monarch.  Basileia or “kingdom” adds a vertical dimension, allowing us to see our equality in terms of one universal authority, who is God, the Creator.      

The problem with kin-dom is that it can ignore and even deny that there is any vertical dimension at all.  It says the world is flat, and we are all equals to each other in a distributed network of mutual and reciprocal interaction.  Which would be great, if it could stay that way.  

But “kin” means family, and families are not necessarily about equality or justice.  Families are quite complicated and too often include domineering characters, codependencies, and so on.      

Plus, if “kin-dom” does mean equality, acceptance, and inclusion, we have seen that, left to our own devices it is hard to sustain.  For we are not in fact all born equally gifted and able.  Those who come into life better endowed with strength, attractiveness, intelligence, and ability, start rising above others and inevitably abuse their status.  Any thought of equality quickly disappears in an environment where the strong are not accountable to anyone above or beyond themselves. 

In a one-dimensional, flat equality, the fortunate start asking: “Who says we should all be treated equally?  Who says we are all kin, related to each other and responsible for each other?  Why should I not use what I have to get more for myself?  Why should I not take what I can get?  Why should I not rise above and even dominate those who are weaker, less attractive, and less bright?”  In the flat model, a pyramidal structure of human society automatically and paradoxically develops.  We end up with the system that opens the Book of Exodus, which is the beginning of the biblical story.  It has Pharaoh at the top, and Hebrew slaves at the bottom.  It is Empire: a kind of kin-dom, but headed by an abusive, manipilative, violent father.

The result of this settling of power into the hands of a few was not just the horrible oppression and exploitation of the lowest caste, it also resulted in the environmental disasters of the ten plagues afflicting Egypt.  

For true equality to be developed and sustained, a society has to take steps to ensure that the weak, the poor, and the marginalized are lifted up, and the well-endowed are emptied and brought down.  Language that recognizes the vertical dimension of our life creates justice.  We talk about how we are all “under” God as king in order to counteract the coagulation of power in the hands of the strong.  We recognize, accept, and obey an authority above the human ego.  We have to acknowledge a responsibility to something other than our own power, greed, lust, gluttony, and desire. 

That something is, in a sense, everything.  By that I mean that the accumulation of power in the hands of a few is mitigated by the acknowledgement of a Higher Power who made, owns, and gives being and value to all things.  We have to affirm one God, in whom all things and people are essentially one, and one common pattern/wavelength/voiceprint that weaves everything together in a united whole.  We are responsible to maintain that inclusive wholeness.  When we don’t, when we assert our independence and seek domination or gain for ourselves, we create an imbalance in the whole.  This will cause us suffering when that balance inevitably restores itself.

It is therefore necessary that we recognize and submit to a personal power higher than the ego, and a political power higher than Pharaoh/Empire and its demands.  The existence and will of this power is applied by means of a law which is above all.  We see this, of course, in the giving of the Torah.  But Torah is not independent of the deeper, unwritten laws of nature.  Indeed, the regulations of the Torah are intended to realize obedience in human society to the deeper and higher laws of creation.

So true kin-dom or commonwealth, a shared gathering of equals, depends on realizing that we are all accountable to each other because we are all made by one God in whose being we somehow share, “who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6).

I don’t know if using the word kin-dom is sustainable.  But if we use it we have to understand that it unites us to each other only under or before the living One who makes and holds everything in being, who is the God of love.

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What If Protestantism Is Inherently Racist?

When Protestantism was forming, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the men sitting in the pews on Sundays were spending the other days of the week inventing colonialism and capitalism.  How does that fact determine what the church is facing today? 

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Presbyterians and the other mainline Protestant denominations have for over half a century expressed a commitment to racial justice.  We have firmly renounced racism, and launched ambitious programs aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity.  We have elected and appointed people-of-color to visible positions of authority.  We have strenuously advocated for public policies aimed at eliminating and correcting centuries of racial bias from our national life.  We have even mustered the confessional courage and self-awareness to recognize and name in our history and practices an implicit or even explicit connection to white supremacy.  We strongly and unequivocally affirm our intention to root this out.

All of which is very good, as far as it goes.

Which isn’t very far.  

I mean, we make good statements.  But do good statements substitute for effective and transformative action?  How much has all this anti-racism talk actually trickled down into the life of our presbyteries, congregations, and members?

After all this time (65 years seems like forever to Americans) we Presbyterians still register as a denomination that is 91% white.  How many Presbyterians voted for the virulently racist former occupant of the White House?   My Facebook feed regularly features Presbyterians posting loud demands that we appreciate the police, mourn over the losses suffered by businesses from last summer’s “rioting,” affirm that all lives matter, and mock kneeling football players. 

Our regional synod regularly presents in vain overtures to the General Assembly attempting to redress the lack of minority representation in our councils by allowing congregations to elect elders who do not need to serve on a local session.  I support this approach, but it only highlights the real problem, which is that congregations do not regularly elect members of cultural minorities to be elders in the first place, often because congregations don’t include many such people, if any.  An informal review of our statistics indicates that almost all Presbyterian congregations are over 95% of a single ethnic group.  The most recent General Assembly, in the midst of a trifecta of national crises including racial unrest, was presented with several opportunities to express support for “Black women and girls,” and declined to do so.

It makes me wonder if racism isn’t just simply baked into our denominational DNA.  Is something about our identity and the way we operate inherently white supremacist?  Does this rot go deeper than mere technical adjustments can address?  Is it an invisible element of what it means to be Presbyterian, or a Protestant?  In recent years we have been discovering how much of our own U.S. political system was designed to accommodate and protect slavery, and therefore racist by design.  Is something like this the case for Presbyterianism as well, and we have been blind to it?

The Reformation happened in northern Europe in the 16th century, between the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment,” as part of the spawning of the Modern Age.  It was deeply influenced if not determined by the tectonic shifts in the culture of that time and place.  Modernity came to be characterized by the rise of the so-called middle-class, wanted freedom from Popes, bishops, priests, and eventually kings and nobles.  They valued individualism, and advocated for literacy, capitalism, democracy, nationalism, and scientific and technological thinking. 

The middle-class should more accurately be called the owner-class.  And when they gained power it became apparent that they only understood “freedom” to apply to themselves.  Their enthusiasm for “human rights,” at first only included some humans: namely white, male, property owners.  They imposed their own brutal, extractive tyranny over others: slaves, women, workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples.   

Too often the response of the Protestant churches (in spite of an activist minority that did work to do things like abolish slavery) was largely to ignore, deny, or justify these many atrocities.  Since most of those oppressed people were non-white, white supremacy became part of the package.  Thus, white supremacy spread around the world in partnership with Protestantism.  

The values and preferences of the owner-class were embodied in Protestant ecclesiastical polities.  A reflexive and selective individualism showed a libertarian streak that favored those already favored with wealth and power.  They imagined that their structures made everyone equal, but in practice they privileged those with the time and money to participate.  In America this often broke down along racial lines.

In short, Protestantism features a built-in, implied white supremacy.  It is also embedded in our Presbyterian polity.  It will not be excised by our merely making grand statements about rejecting it.  We need to change (among other things) our ecclesiastical structures, which are based on the assumptions of Modern Age ideology.  Specifically, our reflexive hyper-individualism will have to be balanced by a stronger sense of community, freedom by responsibility, and arrogance by humility.  

We will have to realize that what matters in the church is less the will of the majority, discovered through an intentionally and artificially adversarial process, and more the will of Jesus Christ, discerned by a community gathered in the Holy Spirit.  More to the point, we will have to develop processes that give preference and priority to the voices of those with whom Jesus explicitly identifies: the poor, the powerless, and the marginalized.

In short, the whole culture of Protestantism has to change, including some of its core values, if we are going to follow Jesus Christ, and have a place in the emerging multi-cultural, multi-racial world.

  

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Is America Possible?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that, “all men are created equal,” he presented a vision of America as a multi-cultural, multi-racial democracy.  How else do we understand the word “all”?  How else do we understand the word “equal”?  (And we assume he was using “men” to refer generically to all people, as was the custom back then.)  As a nation we have always taken this statement as an affirmation of our basic identity, even if somewhat aspirational.  

Unfortunately, we have struggled to understand exactly what he meant, and what we are able to accept, by “all men are created equal.”  Did the signers of the Declaration of Independence really intend to refer to all people?  Or just all adult, white males, like all of them?  The 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments to the Constitution came closer to upholding and affirming the vision that all people are created equal.  But our actual practice, including significant decisions by the Supreme Court over the years, often went the other way and implicitly upheld the priority and privilege of white men.  Jefferson’s words were reduced to window dressing, a lie we told ourselves and others to make us feel good, evolved, and morally superior.

Here we see the two Americas.  The debate over these conflicting and mutually exclusive visions has been intensifying.  Are we living into that vision of inclusion and equality, as the most multi-racial and multi-cultural nation in history, “the last, best hope of earth,” as Lincoln said?  Or will we remain mired in ignoring, excusing, defending, or enforcing a caste system with white men at the top?   

Is the former even possible in real life?  Or is it simply human nature that societies must have one central group exercise priority, set the agenda, tell the story, determine the images, hold the power, and control the institutions?  Do we have to privilege the canons and values of “Western Civilization”?  Is that the center that has to hold?  Or can we be one nation and have multiple stories, or does one nation mean one story?  Is there a story wide and inclusive enough to embrace everyone and exclude nobody?  Or will our differences dominate and separate us?  Will we collapse in chaos and disorder if white men are not in charge?

The crisis of this moment, the crisis behind all our other crises, is shifting demographics.  Sometime soon, white people will constitute less than 50% of Americans.  We will become a nation without a racial majority.  This is existentially threatening to some white people, which is why they are frantically resorting to lies and violence in defense of their status.  They want to maintain white supremacy in America by any means necessary, because any other America will not be America as they remember it, and therefore not the real America at all.  To them, any other America does not appear to be worth living in.  Better to burn the whole house down than let other people sit at the table as equals.

For such people, I fear that multi-culturalism works only so long as the basic framework of the caste system remains in place and whites retain priority.  Others would be welcome, but only as long as they learn and defer to the history, values, language, and religion of Europeans.  This cultural heritage is thought to be the gravitational center of America which holds everything together; without which America-as-we-know-it ceases to exist.

But a nation cannot have minority rule and at the same time accurately call itself a democracy.  Minority rule denies that “all people are created equal.”  Thus, the “America” that white supremacists want to maintain cannot be a democracy.  This is why they undermine and cripple democracy whenever they can.  Two current strategies are voter suppression (based on a lie about rampant “voter fraud,” and racial gerrymandering.)  They may dress all this up and call it a “republic,” but that is disingenuous.  Minority rule, no matter what it is labelled, is not sustainable without an ever-increasing application of propaganda, exclusion, and repression. 

Diversity is a fact in this country.  It has been since Europeans and Africans first arrived in the early 17th century.  Now we will have to figure out how to live together as a country that has no racial majority.  America, if it is to survive, requires a story that includes and embraces our glorious diversity.  That is, in fact, the only possible America.  Let’s be clear: we will either be a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, or America will implode into continuous, debilitating conflict.  

In short, we have no choice but to lose the settler-colonialist story, where everything depends on and revolves around Europeans.  Rejecting that narrative and the behaviors it inspires will mean acknowledging that America was stolen from indigenous peoples and built by the labor of African slaves and poorly paid workers from Asia and Latin America.  These groups have been relegated to the bottom of the American caste system, and continue to suffer prejudice, indignity, and violence.  That system has to be abolished.  Amends in the form of reparations are in order. 

The new story will develop that original vision articulated by Jefferson, about all people being created equal.  That hope and promise, of this continent as a place of spectacular beauty and natural resources, where people of different nationalities and ethnicities may dwell together and construct together a community of inclusion and thanksgiving, with respect toward each other and the Earth, is the contribution of  Europeans. 

The new story will recognize the fact that we are all here, and that it is time to figure out how to move forward together, as equals.

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Coming "Back"?

Jesus says: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Talk is increasing about churches opening up and getting “back to normal” after the pandemic (whenever that is).  As we prepare for this, let’s remember what Jesus says here.  Let’s remember that, in discipleship, there is no going “back.”

Some will show up at church expecting, hoping, even demanding that everything go back to the way it was.  They want to worship like it’s 2019.  It is an understandable sentiment, given all we have been through.  We may justifiably crave the stability, familiarity, and comfort of the church life we once knew.

But I wonder what stability, familiarity, and comfort 

have to do with discipleship.  

For there is no going back.  2020-2021 will not be a meaningless detour after which we may resume our journey where we left off.  Rather, like most detours, we will find ourselves in a very different place, much farther on up the road, maybe even on a different road altogether. 

The 18 months or so we will have slogged our way through the pandemic have changed us.  This difficult time has revealed things about us, good and bad.  It has changed relationships, the economy, and our politics.  The whole way we see society, each other, the planet, and ourselves has shifted.  Far from simply picking up the story in 2019 before we were so rudely interrupted, the world of 2021 and forward will be something new and unfamiliar.

And we will have to keep adjusting and adapting, even after the pandemic has run its course, as we try to find a new equilibrium together.  There will be a strong tendency to pretend like nothing has happened and we can get back to the way it was.  On the other hand, many will find opportunities and assume some changes are permanent.  I suggest nothing is permanent.  The days after the pandemic will not look like when we were in the middle of it any more than they will merely repeat the time before.

None of this should particularly bother Christians.  

Our life is not about the past or preserving an old social order or economy.  Disciples of Jesus Christ 

have an inherently an essentially future orientation.  

Christianity is at its heart an apocalyptic and eschatological faith.  

Our prayer is “Your Kingdom come,” 

which means we are always looking ahead, 

listening as God’s Word, Jesus Christ, 

calls us forward into the fullness of time, 

into the realization of his true humanity, 

when God is revealed as all in all.

If we are consumed with grief, wallowing in nostalgia, or even reacting in anger, over what we have lost; if we are craving a return to what is, after all, just the arbitrary “normal” of 2019; if we are looking to the Church to pat us on the head and oh-poor-baby us to sleep as a way to escape or avoid change, we will have missed the opportunity Jesus is placing in our lap.  For this is a kairos moment if there ever was one.  That is, in the same way that a personal crisis can lead a person to faith, so a global crisis can be the shock that causes a shift in the way we see and act in the world.  

I wonder if the pandemic will not serve as the final jumpstart of the next era in human history.  Maybe it is the terminus of the long-disintegrating Modern Age, and now the shape of the emerging new era will become more clear.  

And the Church has to consciously and intentionally inhabit its role as beachhead, vanguard, and model of the new humanity.  We are — and always have been, in spite of our historical addiction to serving as reactionary lapdog for the Empire — the Ministry of the Future.  

So rather than imagine we can settle back into old routines and habits, this will be a time for discernment, discipleship, and equipping ourselves for mission in a different and changing world.  If we blow this opportunity, and choose instead inertia, and merely continue to regurgitate the worship and mission structures of the 1950’s, or feed on the corpse of 16th century theologies, the Church will deserve its consequent demise.  The Spirit will have moved on.

The point is not innovation for innovation’s sake.  Neither is it to dispense with whatever is old.  It is following the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ in a new time.  It is about finding the future that is always breaking into our present.  It is about putting our hand to the plow and looking ahead.

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The Jesus Prayer and Discipleship.

I have practiced the Jesus Prayer as a pillar of my personal spirituality for over 40 years.  This prayer has become so ingrained in me that occasionally I will notice that it has started itself up in my consciousness on its own.  I have repeated the prayer countless times in every kind of circumstance: walking and running, driving, going to sleep, praying, and of course in meditation.  It has become a constant companion.

The prayer itself is very simple.  The basic form is: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God: have mercy on me, a sinner.”

How does the Jesus Prayer make me a better disciple?  That is basically the only question I use to assess the value of anything. 

The invocation of the Name of Jesus is intended to accomplish two things.  First, it is an appeal to the Christ within me, my Essence.  And second, it is a way of identifying and releasing my own ego, which is what prevents the full realization of Christ within me.  These two hopes constitute the two parts of the prayer.

Authentic spirituality is a movement from ego to Essence, from “old self” or “the flesh,” to our “new self” or “spirit.”  We move from a false, invented, projected, and highly defended ego-centric sense of ourselves as separate, at-risk, alienated, and deluded about its own independence, to a realization of our true self, which is connected to everything and everyone.  The true self is Christ within us, through and in whom we realize our integration and participation in all creation, and even the Creator.

Calling on the Name of Jesus awakens us to the Presence of Christ, our true self, within us.  It is a desire to see emerging at our very core this original identity, which is Jesus Christ.  This Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is the spiritual Presence and Wisdom that flavors and permeates everything that God has breathed into existence.  He is the shape and pattern, the wavelength and voiceprint, of the living God.  He is the Creator encoded in everything.  Therefore, he is the Way to communion with and in everything.   

But I admit this is too verbal and abstract.  The Jesus Prayer is words… but the words are like an icon, a window to something far deeper.  If we just analyze the words, we have done almost nothing.  

Usually, when I say the prayer, I connect it with my breath.  I inhale on the first phrase: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and exhale on the second: “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”  This wedding of the prayer to my breath is supposed to get the words out of my mind and into my body.  It physicalizes the prayer, connecting it to sensation.  I feel the breath — and also the beating of my heart, and indeed other physical sensations, like the air on my skin, the weight of my body, even the sounds of my environment — and the prayer becomes grounded in the moment.  I become present to the moment and the matter of my own body and immediate location.

Just as Jesus Christ is a single, mortal, historical human being for a specific time and in a specific place, and through him we see God and all creation… so also do we need to ground ourselves in a specific time and place by means of physicality and sensation —  breath — which becomes the place of our realization of our union with all.  But unless we can get down to this Real Presence in an experience and consciousness of our own temporal materiality in this breath, we continue to be lost in the fog of abstract mental processes and interpretations which only  separate us from life and reality, and continue to bind us to the old, ego self.

So the Jesus Prayer is about nothing less than becoming Christ.  It is a way of fulfilling the saying of Sts. Irenaeus, Athanasius, and other early Christians: “God became human so that humans might become God.”  

Robert E. Kennedy put it this way: “Christians are not taught to imitate Christ at all, but to be transformed into Christ.  Christians are not urged to copy or repeat the words or gestures of Christ, but to have his mind and be one with his spirit.”

To me, that is what the Jesus Prayer does.  It is therefore the foundation and taproot of discipleship.

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It's About Power.

 

Power matters.  It is one thing for a tiny, weak, new religious movement to criticize and complain about its bad treatment at the hands of a more powerful religious establishment.  This is what’s going on in a lot of the New Testament’s attitude towards “the Jews” and the Pharisees.  But when the tables are turned, and that weaker group evolves into the State Religion of the Roman Empire, and that formerly stronger group becomes a small minority, those same words can  become poison, and used to justify unthinkable atrocities and violence.  It turns out that the power differentials are more important than the mere names and labels groups happen to have.  From this perspective, the oppressed Jewish communities in Europe had way more in common with Jesus and his early followers than did the pompous, wealthy, culturally ubiquitous Roman Catholic Church.

Power matters.  Which American Christian community relates more closely to the position of the Bible, and of Jesus: the prosperous, all-but-established, tall-steeple church full of middle-class white people at the center of town?  Or the gatherings of the descendants of slaves on the outskirts?

Some may ask why it is okay for Black people to chant that “Black lives matter!” but not okay for white people to chant that white lives matter?  Why is one chant justified and the other an example of disgraceful racism?  Because of power.  People whose lives have been shown not to matter to those who have power — police, courts, banks, businesses, and so on — are justified in making their voices heard and appealing for equal treatment.  But when the people whose lives already matter, as shown by the deferential treatment they habitually receive from every institution, howl about their lives mattering too, it is clearly a hollow and cynical ploy intended to preserve their superior status.   

When I was in seminary there was a long effort to convince the administration to set aside space for a Women’s Center.  Many of the liberal men spoke in favor of this.  When it finally happened and a small room was dedicated as the new Women’s Center, the women declared it a man-free zone.  Some of the men who supported the effort on the grounds of equality were incensed about this.  They did not understand power, or equality.  It is okay and necessary for a small, minority making its way in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment to gather separately to share their stories and concerns without having to accommodate people who not only have no understanding of their situation, but actively maintain their marginalization. 

When we don’t take power differentials into account and delude ourselves that everyone is somehow functionally equal, then we will simply not understand the world or relationships.  Indeed, we will do a lot of damage by our ignorance.  Because only those who have experienced the business-end of inequality understand that people are not treated the same.  The ones who benefit don’t see it.  The ones who suffer do.

Today I listened to Andrew Cuomo’s profuse apologies for his offensive and intrusive behavior towards women.  He sounded mystified that anyone would take offense at his actions.  People who have power are not necessarily conscious that they have it, or its effects on others.  They often seem to imagine that they are just like everyone else, that there is this mythical level playing field, and that there is no difference between the words and actions of a Starbucks barista and the Governor of New York.

So human society is a minefield of power inequalities.  With everyone we meet, there is a complex set of power differentials based on race, gender, class, status, health, abilities, ethnicity, age, and many other categories.  All tis has to be recognized and navigated, all the time.  

The radical approach of the Lord Jesus to this situation is first to welcome especially those excluded by the society: the poor, women, the sick, the possessed, children, and people condemned as “sinners.”  Even more importantly, Jesus identifies with them.  He lives with them.  He embraces their lifestyle.  His welcoming is not a paternalistic, charitable accommodation.  No, he empties himself of superiority,  privilege, and power.  Living intentionally in simple humility and joyful acceptance, in recognition of the humanity he shares with each, Jesus thereby becomes a kind of conduit by which his divinity also gets shared with others, enabling them to access the power they have within them.  How often, when someone is healed, does he refuse to accept the credit, and say “Your faith has made you well”?

Discipleship means, at least, going consciously towards the lowest place.  It means divesting ourselves of power.  It means coming to identify with the neediest and most broken among us.  It means realizing that this self-offering is the shape of divine activity in the world, beginning even with creation itself.  In this way powerlessness opens us to receive the ultimate power which works in the world in and through us.

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