PCUSA General Assembly 223 + Day Five.

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.

+++++++

Christians and the Law.

Recently I have been involved in some conversations about law.  Some folks are of the opinion that somehow our national laws are above mere politics.  They should therefore be enforced as vigorously and pitilessly as possible.  This is particularly the case when the laws are aimed at people they hate and fear, like immigrants and refugees today.

In defense of this rather high view of law, they will attempt to drag in the Bible on their side, as if the Bible were all about our duty to obey and rigorously enforce the laws of the State.   The passages usually cited in this argument are Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17.  Some seem to believe that ripping these passages out of context and injecting them into a discussion automatically terminates all disagreement.  As if God has now spoken conclusively and categorically, and now we have no choice but to submit.

But context is important.  In fact, context often determines meaning.  The actual situation in which words are uttered or written matters.  To ignore the historical context is to unconsciously impose the reader’s own context on the text.  

In the 1st century, the church was a tiny, oppressed community trying to survive in a hostile empire.  Christians refused to worship the Roman emperor, which made their movement inherently and necessarily illegal to begin with.  The kind of advice the apostles give in passages like Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 is that followers of Jesus should not make unnecessary waves that would make the authorities to take notice of and come down on them.  (Just like the parents of African American boys have to teach them to be particularly respectful and cooperative in any encounter with police.)  It is more a matter of acting as if the State were doing its job of maintaining order and justice, even when it isn’t. 

So these passages do not in any way legitimize Roman law or authority that at the time was engaging in active persecution of the church, a persecution which would dramatically intensify in the next couple of centuries.  They certainly should not be taken to mean that Christians must disobey Jesus' explicit teachings in order to obey Roman law.  That would have been to make Jesus subject to the State.  It would have been the death of the church.  That would be to reject the sacrifice of countless martyrs who refused to obey the laws of evil powers.  The idea that the apostles would have us keep every law promulgated by the State, no matter how destructive or wrong, is therefore ridiculous.  Indeed, the very men who wrote this advice for the church, Peter and Paul, were also both, like Jesus himself, executed by the State for being incorrigible law breakers.

Should Christians in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany have submitted to those legally constituted authorities and participated in the evil they were doing?  Should Christians renounce their faith in countries where Christianity is against the law?  Should obedience to the laws of any State take precedence in the life of a disciple over the teachings of Jesus?  Of course not.  

When the State makes and enforces laws that transgress God’s law, revealed in Jesus Christ, Christians have an obligation to resist and even break those laws, accepting the consequences for doing so.  When the State concocts laws contrary to God’s will, and then enforces them with mindless ferocity, Christians are called upon to side with Jesus, who sides with the oppressed victims of such laws.

Passages like Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 do not demand that Christians compromise their discipleship in order to uphold State law.  Rather, they call upon the State to live up to God’s vision of peace, and become worthy of people’s obedience. 

+++++++

PSUSA General Assembly 223 + Day Four.

Day Four.

1.

There may come a time when people look back and try to discern the exact day when the Presbyterian Church (USA), like the Lost Son in Jesus’ parable, came to itself, and turned its face towards the household of God, and began the journey home.  June 19, 2018, could be that day.  For that was when 800 participants in a PCUSA General Assembly took to the streets and delivered 47 thousand dollars to people languishing in the local jail awaiting bail.  Having attended about 10 General Assemblies, I can say that something like this was almost unimaginable before yesterday.  We never engaged with the city hosting us.  Indeed, four years ago, it was not until we got back home that we learned about the water crisis in Detroit, which was going on while the General Assembly was meeting in that city!

It was an astonishing and exhilarating experience to be with so many Presbyterians engaged in a direct action like this.  I have been in many demonstrations over the decades, but never in one that was so explicitly Presbyterian.  My dad attended the March on Washington in 1963 and heard Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech live.  I could not help thinking how proud he would have been to see engaged Presbyterians.

This is a different denomination than the one I was ordained into in 1981.  Heck, it’s a different denomination from last Thursday.

2.

The day began with a Bible Study time, this time by Professor Naj Nedella: “The Imperial Paradox and the Kindom of God in Matthew’s Gospel.”  He started with a focus on Herod’s banquet in Matthew 14, which ends with the beheading of John the Baptizer.  John’s crime was the criticism of economic injustice and preaching a repentance that turned away from the practices of empire.  Empire demands, in spite of its own propaganda, a two tiered system in which the mass of people at the bottom support the comfort and privilege of the few people at the top.  In order for wealth to accrue there has to be war and poverty in the colonies.  This is the imperial paradox.  These economic structures were sanctioned and sanctified by the gods.

In Matthew 15, Jesus presents a different kind of banquet in feeding 5000 people on a hillside, in deliberate contrast with Herod’s banquet.  Jesus goes into the wilderness — John’s base — and inherits the same anti-imperialist agenda.

Later in the chapter, Jesus has his encounter with a Canaanite woman in which he initially responds from a zero-sum worldview, mimicking the exclusive, racist views of his own people.  Against the Roman strategy of pitting oppressed groups against each other for “scarce” resources, It is the woman herself who witnesses to the gospel of sharing that Jesus himself is enacting in the feeding events which happen both before and after this encounter.

So against false and oppressive scarcity, Jesus redefines family, saying “Yes, ma’am” to this “enemy” woman.  The bread in these stories stands for Jesus’ mission, which culminates in chapter 26 with the institution of the eucharist.

3.

The luncheon sponsored by Presbyterians for Earth Care featured an address by Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, who heads the PCUSA Washington Office.  He talked about the “Reclaiming Jesus” statement from a group of Christian leaders, as well as the Poor People’s Campaign now happening across the country.  To follow Jesus means participating in his healing, teaching, and preaching ministry.  Both the Hebrew Bible in Exodus and the New Testament with Jesus started as poor peoples’ campaigns.

4.

Then we marched.  Nearly a thousand Presbyterians took to the streets and walked about a mile to the jail where we gave money to folks who will use it to pay the bail of people awaiting trial.  The cash bail system is a brick in the wall of oppression of poor people.  These people are picked up on various misdemeanors and left to languish in jail for a long time for want of bail money.  They lose their jobs; their families suffer; and the conditions in the “work house” to which they are sent are horrendous.  

But the real miracle is that this happened at all.