The Shinnecock Witness.

There is an Indian reservation on Long Island.  It has been there since the 18th century.  But the people have been there, on that very land, for thousands of years.  

The reservation is in the middle of The Hamptons, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the world, with expansive multi-million dollar houses all over the place, with manicured lawns maintained behind high hedges.  

The indigenous Shinnecock people are not wealthy.  Sixty percent of them live below the poverty line; some have no running water and many dwell in housing that is substandard in other ways.  Substance abuse is a continuing crisis, as is unemployment.    

They were originally allowed a 3600 acre reservation… but since 1859 much of this land has been gradually (and illegally) appropriated by wealthy white people, who devoted it to railroads, highways, developments, and a very fancy golf course (built on ancient burial grounds).  The current de facto reservation is a fraction of that, almost all on a single peninsula in Shinnecock Bay.

There are in the world a few inflection points where the collision between settler colonialism and indigenous peoples, is particularly acute.  Palestine is one of them.  Shinnecock is another.

The Shinnecock Nation is a hold-out of life against the spreading, corrosive cancer of a money-grubbing, polluting, thieving, arrogant white supremacy that treats everything and everyone as a commodity to be extracted, used up, and converted into private wealth and toxic waste.  There is no way to look positively upon the garish monstrosities that consume the land, poison the water, and exploit underpaid labor in The Hamptons.  The Shinnecocks are making a stand in favor of living simply in harmony with creation*, and against an insatiable machine of unmitigated evil devouring everything in its path.

The big difference here is world-views, and it is, in my opinion, the basis for centuries of mis-communication and one-sided violence.  The two groups see time and creation from opposite perspectives.  The modern, white people see God’s creation in terms of  “resources” to be exploited, which is to say, turned by force into private wealth.  And they see time in a similar way, apparently believing that it only began in 1639 when the forces of European “progress” arrived.  Everything prior to that is all but nonexistent, as is anyone not participating in their metanarrative of privilege and “development.”  Most of all, the English brought with them a corrosive individualism that severely devalued and even negated all senses of community, from creation to the family.  For the settlers, only individuals exist, with priority given to the rich and powerful.  Upon this assumption we have based all our law, religion, morality, and values.  

The Shinnecock people, on the other hand, see reality in terms of communities and wholes.  The land is held by the tribe (which makes even having street addresses problematic for white institutions).  And they see their ancestors as still part of their community, which is why disturbing their resting places is so offensive to them.  They understand themselves to be part of a larger community of creation itself, including the land, the sea, the animals, and others.  

And they don’t particularly care about money.  Each one of them would instantly become wildly wealthy were the tribe to sell their land and split the proceeds among the members.  For white people this refusal is utterly incomprehensible.  It seems insane to them.  They intuitively realize it is a judgment on their own reflexive greed, and they react with fear, anger, and hatred.

To Christians, the Shinnecock people present a challenge.  Because it is absurdly evident that indigenous peoples live in a way close to that of Jesus Christ, who owned almost nothing, walked lightly on the Earth perceiving God in nature, founded inclusive communities, and was subject to the tyranny of both reactionary religion and colonialist laws.  We who claim the name of Christ, on the other hand, too often find ways to rationalize and justify the continued abuse of God’s creation and poor, indigenous, and working people.

The racist and individualist “values” of settler colonialism run so deep in our European DNA that the words of the gospel are often quite opaque to us. 

At this point abandoning those habits of thought and action would necessarily demand a change in the very way we think.  More importantly, it would mean a thorough and comprehensive reassessment of everything about the character of the presence of Europeans in this hemisphere at all.  In other words, repentance.  Metanoia.  

Not that there is any going back.  But we will have to find a way forward that is more just and humane than the steamrolled highway that brought us to this sad, degraded point in history.  I am not just talking about this particular case, or even of indigenous rights in general.  The same regime that is oppressing the Shinnecocks is also kicking the whole atmosphere of the Earth out of balance, generating a global rat’s nest of crises from wildfires and massive floods, to increasingly frequent and severe storms, to a rise in refugees… and what we are now experiencing is just the beginning.

We need, in short, to follow Jesus and is Way of humility, simplicity, community, and healing.  In other words, we need humbly to learn from, and be more like, indigenous peoples.  

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Advice for PNC's.

1. A church may seek to appeal to younger people.  Or it may preserve its traditions.  It cannot do both.  Stop asking your prospective pastors to do the impossible.

2. Do not claim to “welcome everyone” unless you really do welcome everyone.

3. Forget about “young families” if by that you mean cis-hetero married couples under 35 with biological offspring.  They mostly don’t exist.

4. Forget about bringing back people who have left the church.  It is extremely unlikely that they are coming back.

5. Do not include the date of your church’s founding in your MIF.  Nobody cares except that it measures how out of touch you are.

6. Stop expecting your pastor to have “office hours.” 

7. Stop expecting your pastor to visit people in their homes except in emergencies.

8. Giving small amounts of money to a wide variety of local social service agencies is not “mission.”

9. Do not ask that your pastor be a “change agent” unless you can say with great specificity what that means.
10. When you are contacting a candidate, clearly identify your town and State. Just saying you're from "First Church" is not helpful. 

Reformation Sunday.

Reformation Day is October 31, commemorating the date in 1517 when Martin Luther hammered his 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, sparking the Reformation.  This year it falls on this coming Sunday.

Early in my career I thought this a cool time to remember our Protestant history.  Invariably we would sing Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and stress the doctrines and approaches that became characteristic of Protestantism.

But eventually I got frustrated with that approach.  If we sink too much energy into looking back, we don’t have much left for what is going on now.  We can’t imagine that the Church was reformed back then and that everything has been fine ever since.  If we pay too much attention to the 16th century, we lose sight of both the original revelation and Christ’s continued Presence.  

I remember my grandfather telling me how, in that hymn, “the Prince of Darkness grim” was supposed to refer to the Pope, who, at the time, was waging war against Luther’s followers.  Later I learned that the hymn was used by the Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s, and they understood the Prince of Darkness to be Hitler.  When I began my ministry in 1981, I went to a clergy retreat led by Christian ethicist, Paul Lehmann.  He suggested that that title might be applied as well to the new President at the time, who was embarking on a program of injustice and predatory economics from which we have yet to recover, 40 years later.  Still more recently, we have had a leader whose cynical greed and lying knew no bounds, who instigated a murderous insurrection, undermined a legitimate election, botched our response to a deadly pandemic, and continues to retain millions of devotees.

My point is that we can’t reduce Reformation Day to a historical artifact.  Some of the dynamics that pertained back then persist in every generation and even today.  Tyranny, greed, ignorance, lies, and violence assault the Church all the time; the Holy Spirit is always reforming the people of God according to God’s Word, Jesus Christ.

Neither can we continue to harp on the theological issues that were at stake in the 16th century.  They became less relevant with each passing decade, until now, it is hard to generate any energy over things like “sola scriptura,” “salvation by grace through faith,” or “the priesthood of all believers.”  Not that these didn’t have elements of truth which needed lifting up and defending at that time.  But not only can undue attention to these questions unnecessarily divide Christians today, but it can be a distraction from the issues that the Spirit is calling us to address now.

For instance, Luther’s action has fed into the Modern mythology about the courageous outlaw individual who bucks the system to become successful doing his own thing.  His interpretation of the conflict between law and grace has been used to justify virulent pathologies from anti-semitism to the “cheap grace” that (Lutheran) Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw was neutralizing the gospel and killing the Church.

In other words, many Protestant ideas and approaches have been twisted into service of the domination system of Modernity, and used to justify racism, slavery, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and war.  These have become some of the most pressing things we need to deal with in our time.

Maybe “reformation” itself is a dated concept that is now an obsolete relic of the Modern Age.  Maybe the Church today needs to understand change in a different way.  Not as reformation, but the word I use to describe what needs to happen now is “emergence.”  In other words, we are not called to reform the Church.  I am not even sure the Church itself is always “being reformed” by the Spirit, if by that we imply a kind of “get with the times” mentality placing the Church in a perpetual mode of response and reaction.  Reform too often means that the changing culture sets the agenda, as if we need a retooling or an upgrade.  A Christianity 4.0 or something.

Reform, to use the language of Ronald Heifetz, is a technical fix.  Emergence is a more comprehensive adaptive change… but does not adapt to external environmental shifts, as profound as they may be.  Rather, emergence realizes and participates in our original Source which is always present deep within us and everything.  Reform is a kind of revolution; emergence is a revelation.  Reform has to do with agendas, goals, objectives, strategies, tactics, initiatives, programs, and narratives.  Emergence lets go and lets God.  Reform manages and mixes memory and desire, past and future.  Emergence is Presence.

Five-hundred years ago, the Reformation did get at least one thing right: the Reformers understood at some level that we had to turn our attention first and only to the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is our Source and who is God’s Wisdom and Presence.  

Maybe that’s what we have to do now as well.

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