Promotion of Social Righteousness

We’re going to begin tonight with,
once again, the great end of the church is the promotion of social righteousness.
And I’m just going to admit to you from the start here,
some of what we’ll discuss tonight
might feel elementary to you.
And some of it may seem pointless.
And I hope some of it seem very practical.
If I’ve achieved that,
we’ve done well tonight.
The start of this tonight is actually
going to be quite scriptural.
And the reason for that is it’s a relatively short end,
the promotion of social righteousness.
But if you know anything about Reformed theology,
entire libraries have been filled
with the topic of righteousness.
What does it mean to be righteous?
And so tonight we’re going to start
with a scriptural reading of righteousness
with the hopes of also getting on the same page of what we
mean by that in the Reformed tradition.
So the first scripture passage,
which you can’t see,
is Romans chapter 2 verses 5 through 11.
And as soon as we get it,
I’ll share that with you.
But this is how it reads.
“But because of your stubbornness
and your unrepentant heart,
you are storing up
wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath,
and when his righteous judgment will be revealed.
God will repay each person according
to what they have done.
To those who by persistence and doing good seek glory,
honor, and immortality, he will give eternal life.
But for those who are seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil,
there will be wrath and anger.
There will be trouble and distress
for every human being who does evil,
first for the Jew,
then for the Gentile,
but glory, honor, and peace for everyone who does good,
first for the Jew,
then for the Gentile,
for God does not show favoritism.”
So as Christians who read the book of Matthew
and specifically Jesus’s debates through the gospels
with some of the Pharisees,
we are quick to get the assumption that Jesus was very anti-law.
You hear all the time Jesus criticizing the Pharisees
for being what you might remember,
whitewashed tombs, the idea of their action
being different from their belief.
If you look into first century Judaism,
the belief was not that the law was a burden
or that it was something that made you a slave.
It was actually the exact opposite,
that the law was God’s gift to the Jews,
that the law gave you a pathway to participate
in God’s plan for the universe.
And so Paul here is actually mimicking that same type
of theological understanding.
In fact, he starts by saying that God’s law is good.
It is a faithful plan.
It’s a faithful guide to what God wants for us.
The law is good.
That’s the idea.
The law is good.
It’s a faithful guide to God’s plan.
But it keeps going.
Romans chapter 12, verses 12 through 13.
“All who sin apart from the law will also perish
apart from the law,
and all who sin under the law
will be judged by the law.
For it is those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight,
but it is those who obey the law
who will be declared righteous.” OK,
so here’s the gotcha.
Righteousness does not come in knowing the law.
Righteousness comes in doing the law,
following the law.
Exactly.
It’s not just good enough to have it in your heart.
You have to live it.
Now we’re starting to up the ante.
Now we move on to Romans chapter 3,
9 through 18.
What shall we conclude then?
Do we have any advantage– speaking of the Jews–
do the Jews have an advantage because they had the law?
“No, not at all, for we have already
made the charge that Jews and Gentiles are alike
under the power of sin.
As it is written,
no one is righteous,
not even one.
There is no one who understands.
There is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away.
They have together become worthless.
There is no one who does good, not even one.
Their throats are open graves.
Their tongues practice deceit.
The poison of vipers is on their lips.
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood.
Ruin and misery mark their ways.
And the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Not the most optimistic inspirational morning text, right?
And the reality is,
Paul starts with the law is good.
It’s a faithful guide.
But it’s not just knowing the law,
it’s doing the law.
But the gotcha is,
nobody can do the law.
Whether you’re a Jew or you’re a Gentile, we equally,
universally all fail to do the thing
whether we know it or not.
Are you with me?
So then,
there’s the problem.
God calls us to be righteous.
And yet we are incapable of doing the thing
that we need to do.
So what’s the solution?
Paul goes on in Romans chapter 3,
verses 21 through 24.
“But now apart from the law,
the righteousness of God
has been made known,
to which the law and the prophets testify.
This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ
to all who believe.
There’s no difference between Jew and Gentile,
for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
And all are justified freely by His grace,
the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
You see what Paul did?
He said, “The law is a faithful guide.
But knowing it isn’t good enough.
You have to do it.
You have to obey.
The problem is nobody can obey all of the law.
We cannot do it perfectly.” So the solution?
Righteousness is not something you can do,
but something that is given to you,
which is why we talk about righteousness being given
to us by faith.
In other words, we trust the gift that was given to us
by the only one who was righteous,
who is Jesus Christ.
So righteousness,
then, in the Christian context
is not a result of your action,
but rather a result of a gift.
It is given and not earned.
So therefore, it is a state of being,
not a state of doing.
Craig Barnes,
a theologian and president of one of our seminary,
says, “This is what the Bible means by the term righteous.
It has nothing to do with our piety or our action.
And everything to do with restoring all of life
to the right place where it was created to dwell.”
Let me repeat that last part.
It has everything to do with restoring all of life
to the right place where it was created to dwell.
So the text that we are looking at here from Romans,
as Paul writes this to the church there,
he’s using one word to describe what we have translated as righteous.
It’s “dicayun,” which would have been on the screen.
Anyways,
regardless, the word itself in the original language
was translated– or was understood to mean something like “right”
or “just.” This is the lexical part of this that’s kind of interesting.
Throughout history, you know that the scriptures
have been translated into various languages.
You may know that depending upon what English version you read,
you may be reading from a different language source.
Let me make a for instance.
If you grew up with the King James version of the Bible,
your Bible came originally from the Latin.
That is where they took the text and translated it into English.
The Latin, of course, at some point was translated in history from the original text,
which were written in Greek.
You with me?
So if it was translated from the Latin,
the word that they used to translate this “dicayun”
was “just”
or “justification.” But languages– sorry,
times when they translated directly
from the Greek and into the Anglo-Saxon languages,
some of our more modern translations,
they translated the word “rightwise”
or “righteous.” What’s the point of me telling you this?
When you read the Bible,
you may see the word “righteous,”
and you may see the word “justified.”
Those are most likely the exact same word.
They’re just translated from different sources.
So what’s interesting about that is what in English
we have a nuanced difference in definition
was in the original writing of scripture,
one word.
So if I ask you, what is righteousness,
would you think of righteousness most naturally as being individual,
that righteousness is given
to each one of us individually?
I wonder if I said the word “justification,” especially
if I add the word before it,
“social justification.”
I wonder if you start thinking of that as being public.
In truth,
those are both from the exact same word.
Both of those senses are meant when Paul’s talking
to the Roman Church.
Does that make sense?
This is going to be important,
as today we’re talking about the promotion of social righteousness.
OK, before I go any farther,
I want to pause.
Any questions on what we’ve covered thus far?
And while you raise excellent questions,
I’m going to try again,
because I’m an optimist.
God,
basketball, I could just throw it at it.
Yes, sir.
So righteousness is a gift,
right?
From faith.
Is faith a gift?
Yeah, what do you think?
Well, so the way that theologians
have talked about that in the past,
Jen, is that faith is a preeminent work of the Holy Spirit,
a live network within us, cultivating our heart.
So in other words,
the genesis of faith
is never done in spite of us,
but is also never done apart from God.
Right, so what is– you’re asking
one of the fundamental questions of the Reformation.
What is the human agency in the work of faith,
in the work of God’s work to us?
And that’s a big question,
and my temptation is to follow it to the end.
So what’s a short version of that?
I think,
to summarize,
maybe in a way that’s
helpful for this conversation,
God’s providence is such
that God is large enough as Reformed people.
We believe that God’s providence is so great and large
that he not only knows,
but is ruling and overruling
in a broken world.
And so therefore,
God is, in that way, working against us.
And by that, I mean our sinfulness.
So to the extent to which our sinfulness needs
the Spirit of God to be working even before our awareness
of that, which is what we mean in baptism of infants.
Like God, the Spirit of God is working within us
before we can even conceive of what that work might mean.
Then, when it comes time for us,
if you want to use a church confirmation,
it’s in a couple of weeks.
But when we ask you to profess your faith,
we mean, to what extent can you join your voice
and understanding to the work that God has already been doing?
And we don’t mean that to say that you are doing that without God.
But we are saying that you are doing that
as an act of free will.
And the same way that Adam and Eve
sinned as an act of free will,
you can respond to God’s grace as an act of free will
because God gives you that grace to do so.
So I do think this is important,
though, because this does provide the substrata
of having a really faithful conversation about social righteousness.
Because that’s a complicated answer.
Because if we went around this room
and we asked you all to respond to how your experience of
receiving grace has been,
what has that experience looked
like, I guarantee you we would hear very different stories of grace.
Right?
To the alcoholic or to the person
who’s had significant experience of addiction,
grace comes in the bottoming out in that moment of complete
and utter throwing away.
There’s no other place for me to go but God.
That is an act of grace,
though no one would wish that upon anyone.
Do you understand what I’m saying?
Others would say, I had the grace of growing up with parents
who taught me the faith,
who nourished me in Jesus Christ,
how I woke, how I went through life not even knowing
that Christ was becoming real to me until the day in which I
realized I am a Christian.
That, too, is God’s grace.
So grace is available to all.
But it would be very foolish for us
to pre-script what that grace looks like.
Just move right along my face.
I just do that once in a while, sorry.
[laughter]
You just asked three questions that
would have been about five lectures in systematic theology.
So well done.
That really bugs me.
My computer thinks they’re talking, too.
And they’re not.
That actually has some meaning.
We can talk about that later.
So now we’re moving on from that idea of righteousness,
the idea of following God’s way for the best plan.
And we’re now moving into this idea of the great ends
promoting social righteousness.
What does that really mean?
So to do that,
I want to share with you
a passage that comes from Matthew,
chapter 10, verses 5 through 8.
Those of you who have been to church for a while
know that Jesus talked all the time about the kingdom of heaven.
He said the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
He told parables over and over and over again,
describing what this kingdom looked like.
And so here at chapter 10,
verse 5, Jesus is now sending out his disciples.
And these are the instructions he gives them.
“Do not go among the Gentiles or enter
any town of the Samaritans.
Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.
And as you go, proclaim this message.”
And here the message.
“The kingdom of heaven has come near.
Heal the sick,
raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons.
Freely you have received,
freely give.”
So the kingdom of heaven is near.
What does that mean?
What does the coming of the kingdom look like?
Healing the sick.
Raising the dead.
Cleansing those who have leprosy.
Driving out demons.
What are all of these things?
These are all restoration.
The body that is infirmed,
being restored to a healthy state.
Those who have died,
being raised to new life.
Those who have been driven out of the community
for mental and spiritual diseases,
brought back into fellowship.
What Jesus is saying is,
“The kingdom is here.
People should be restored.”
Does that make sense?
So then we keep moving on.
Well, in Matthew, we’re actually going backwards.
And going to the Lord’s Prayer.
Because in chapter 6,
Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray,
a prayer which I know you all know.
I want, though, to suggest to you
that there’s a break out of the prayer
that you might not initially assume.
Hear this.
“Our Father in heaven,
how would be your name?
Your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.”
Who’s the prayer directed to, towards?
“Our Father,
who art in heaven,
how would be your name?
Your kingdom come.” You with me?
OK, watch the shift.
“Give us today our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we have also forgiven our debtors,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.” See the shift?
“Your kingdom come,
deliver us.”
That is a beautiful portrayal of this idea of righteousness,
of social righteousness.
It could have– they could have said in the great end,
social righteousness.
Or they could have said social justification,
it would have been the exact same word.
It would have meant the same exact thing.
Because what God intends in righteousness,
in things being made whole,
is for both our individual
experience of the world to be made whole,
as well as our social experience to be made whole.
God is never selecting one over the whole.
God is always working for the sake of every person.
Does that make sense?
OK.
So then there are competing foundations
for this idea of social righteousness.
Let’s make this very concrete.
So I shared this with our high schoolers all the time.
You may not know that in the Spirit Lake schools,
there’s six pillars of character.
These pillars are trustworthiness,
respect, responsibility,
fairness, caring,
and citizenship.
And sometime, I’m just like Mike and ask questions
that are hard to answer.
And I ask the students,
why should you care about those pillars?
And the answer always spins in different ways,
right?
Because it’s a good thing to do.
That’s what a person of good character does.
And it spins around and around and around.
And eventually, it always boils down to,
because as a person,
you should have these six pillars
because that’s the nice thing to do.
I mean,
ultimately, it boils down to,
you’re a person.
I’m a person.
We look somewhat similar.
We should have similar life experiences.
We should be nice to each other.
At its bottom,
it’s righteousness with absolutely
no purpose other than niceness,
which is a purpose.
But as Christians, that’s not what we mean
by social righteousness.
We don’t mean that we need to be nice to people
because they look like us or because they talk like us.
What we mean is that at its core,
we need to love others.
And we need to be united with them
because that’s what Christ did.
Unfortunately,
a quote I wanted to share with you
is on the screen.
And I’ll share it with you here,
maybe against my better
judgment, since you can’t see it.
Craig Barnes is, once again,
a theologian.
And he has, I think, a beautiful image.
Instead of reading it,
I’ll just share it with you.
So Craig shares this image.
He says that throughout the ancient world,
especially in the religion of Native Americans,
there was this idea of what was called the axial tree.
And the belief was that the axial tree
sat at the intersection of our earthly existence
and the spiritual existence.
It was the bridge between the two.
And Craig Barnes makes the argument
that the axial tree is something that’s
existed in every religion of all time,
the idea that there’s something in our experience of the world
which allows us to see beyond that experience to something greater.
And Craig Barnes says that’s what Christians
are worshipping under every time we worship under a cross.
That for us,
our axial tree, the thing that makes sense of our experience of the world,
is the cross of Jesus Christ.
That his cross is the place where the kingdom of earth
was met by the kingdom of heaven.
And that we see in the cross God’s plan for all eternity and for now.
God’s promise for you as an individual
and God’s intention for all people of all time.
That the cross is our axial tree.
And if that’s true,
if you find that a compelling image,
then the reason why Christians believe in social righteousness
is not because of niceness,
but because of the person for whom
he gave his life instituted something new and real which
can never be undone.
The sinfulness of the people was atoned for by the perfect.
And in that moment,
we can see God’s hope and promise for all time.
In other words, we believe in justice,
in law,
in goodness and fairness,
not because that’s a nice feel good idea,
but because that’s what Jesus
instituted on the cross.
I might make one comment.
I think I would reverse what you said or that guy said
and say the cross is the reason for the axial tree.
What do you mean by that?
Because God created us where image bearers, that’s his solution.
So we aren’t inheriting anything from the Indians.
They’re inheriting things from their creator.
Sure.
I don’t think he meant to say that the cross has that meaning
because of that religious tradition.
It’s parallel.
Yeah.
I think what he’s saying is that the image of something
that is physical and therefore understandable,
leading us to something that’s greater than that.
That’s helpful, though.
He wasn’t intending to say that the cross was somehow
being reinterpreted by that.
Yeah, that’s helpful.
Other questions?
Comments?
OK.
Thanks for hanging with me.
We’re going somewhere, I promise.
So now we’re going to take a step back in time.
And it’s until now that I’ve waited
to jump into what I think is the loaded word social justice.
Because that is implied by our topic today.
If social righteousness comes from the same root word
as justice, then we need to be attuned to the fact
that this great end is the promotion of social justice.
And what does that mean?
So if we go back and we start looking
at the community in which this document was formed,
I think it helps us.
Cynthia Rigby is an author.
And she says,
the promotion of social righteousness
is not first and foremost about what we’re called to do,
but about who we’re called to be as the body of Christ.
And so here’s a little bit of information
about the United Presbyterian Church.
So the United Presbyterian Church of North America
was the denomination that was working on these great ends
at the turn of the 20th century.
And so from about 1890 to 1913,
they were working on this.
And they were considered to be a theologically conservative
denomination.
So what I mean by that is,
if you were going to be a member of the United Presbyterian Church,
you needed to make your public declaration on your opinion
on the social issues of the day.
So just like our new member Sunday,
it would be asking our new members,
what are your thoughts on A, B, and C?
They also believe that you should only sing songs
in worship, and there should be no instrumentation.
They refused to allow church members
to be members of secret societies
because you had to make an oath,
and you shouldn’t do that
if you were a Christian.
The point I’m making is, theologically,
they were considered incredibly conservative,
even by their day.
But the other side of that is interesting.
They were considered incredibly socially progressive.
They were active opponents to the slave trade.
They actively supported women’s suffrage.
They were on the front lines of some of the day’s conversations about workers’ rights.
They were completely behind the idea of banning alcohol.
They worked on child neglect issues.
They were significantly involved in health care of the day.
And they made prominent and public statements about poverty.
What I think is fascinating about this
is you have people who are considered theologically
uber-conservative,
acting what was considered politically liberal.
And I think this is a helpful image for us
as we seek to understand what it means to be those who
are promoting social righteousness,
that we aren’t defined by the labels of our day,
but rather defined by Jesus Christ.
Instead of claiming as our interpretive meaning
a platform in a book of any political party,
we find our hope and meaning and direction
in the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
And so I think it’s helpful when we travel
into the reality and acceptance and awareness
of our own sinfulness,
the reality that we are broken people,
that from that, we’re incapable to promote wholeness for other people.
So as we sort of keep moving down that road,
how does the Presbyterian Church promote social righteousness?
And I first want to start off with an anti.
We don’t promote social righteousness
by showing the world that we have it all figured out.
Because anyone who’s been Presbyterian for any time
at all knows we don’t have it all figured out.
[laughter]
When we say promote social righteousness,
we do not mean look at our communities that
are completely enlivened by all of our best values.
Because in truth, if you look at our community,
it looks like what we are,
a hospital for sinners.
We’re a place where sick people come to hear the word of God,
and that’s exactly where we should be.
So when we say promote,
we are saying that we are pointing to something
that we believe is real.
This kingdom of God that Jesus Christ said is at hand
is the thing that we are pointing to,
realizing that we don’t always get it right.
We’re not saying,
look at what we have,
you need to catch up.
We’re saying, this is what God has done.
Let’s go towards it.
So the first thing that I want to share with you
about how we as Christians and how we as reform people
can actively work on this idea of social righteousness
is first beginning with what you do in your vocation.
Some of you go to a job every work day, and that’s great.
Some of you have other vocations,
ways in which you
do work that’s unpaid,
but work that is true and meaningful.
When you do that work,
for what reason do you do it?
Right?
When you choose to go with your nursing training,
how you interact with a patient is a reflection
of what you see in them.
Are they a beloved child of God?
That is what your health treatment will reflect.
This gets all the way down to street sweeping.
If you’re a street sweeper,
does your street look like it was swept by a Christian seeking
to bring glory to God?
If you think I’m being crazy,
actually I have a quote on this one.
Martin Luther King Jr.
once said,
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music,
or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all of the hosts of heaven
and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
It may seem strange to us when we go to the office
and we end up doing paperwork all day,
or we don’t go to the office and we’re
volunteering at the hospital,
or we’re visiting with the family member who sit,
that in that moment
is the opportunity for us to practice wholeness,
to practice showing others what Christ intended
for them in his gift.
When you treat another with patience and with love,
with the fruits of the spirit that we’re talking about
throughout the Lenten season,
when you enact that in your life,
you are not just pointing others to Christ.
You are, in that moment,
presenting a real presentation
of the kingdom of God.
Social righteousness looks like what we do
and why that’s meaningful.
Moving on,
as– well, before I move on.
Any questions, thoughts, comments on that?
How we witness in our vocation?
That’d be an interesting talk unto itself.
Trust me,
maybe.
OK.
The next sense is actually,
I think, a few things bundled together.
I called it prophetic witness.
And what I mean by that is, as Christians,
we must always be aware of pairing and sharing
action with words.
Let me tell you what I mean by that.
I had a theological professor who once asked our class.
He asked us, if Jesus had lived,
died on the cross, and rose again,
but never said a word to anyone,
what would that meant for our salvation?
Which was intended to be a complex question
about salvation and atonement and Christ’s work.
But we won’t be distracted by that.
I think what’s interesting about that question is,
what good is our action without words?
If we don’t pair what we do with what Christ has said,
then we don’t bring other people to good news.
You see that all throughout scripture,
right?
If we tell others the gospel who are thirsty
and don’t give them something to drink,
what good did we do?
Well, it also goes the other way around.
So as those in the Reformed tradition,
we have had a long history of thinking seriously and deeply
about what we say when we vote.
When you go into a voting booth and you put a mark down
on a candidate, we’ve taken very seriously
that you’re participating in the institution of power.
And those of you who maybe have done some reading and some
studying on the Reformation,
there was significant distrust in the political power of the day.
When Calvin and Luther are writing,
there’s significant belief that kings and those–
even the pope were powers instituted in these high places,
that those places are almost–
there were arguments made that those
were against the ability for the gospel to be heard,
that political leadership was antithetical
to the kingdom of God,
if that makes sense.
Reformed people have always insisted
in living in that tension and saying, no, our responsibility
is to speak into power.
And the way that we do that in democratic society
is by exercising our voice.
I’ll admit to you,
I find it difficult
to find ways to constructively add a voice into today’s
climate.
I find it hard to find a way to build bridges that aren’t also
destroying multiple other bridges.
But we as Christians are compelled to do that,
to find a voice for those who are voiceless,
to speak of law and goodness and righteousness for those who
could not say it for themselves.
And one way that we are compelled to do that
is through our vote and our participation in our process.
Another is in economics.
The reality is,
though we do not consider much
of our income discretionary,
compared to the world,
it’s remarkably discretionary.
And I have always been compelled,
nay, convicted by a story of John Wesley.
You may have heard this.
I think Pastor Clinton mentioned it once.
But the story is that John Wesley had just
decided to do some decorating in his home.
So he went to the store,
and he bought pictures.
And he brought them home.
And as we all know,
when you buy pictures from the store,
you clear the bank account.
And as it was for John Wesley,
he got home.
He spent his money in his pocket.
And he put the pictures on the wall.
When a beggar came to his door,
knocked in the door, and said,
it was just late fall coming into winter and said, I need clothes.
Can you help me?
Can you give me money for clothes?
John Wesley felt in his pockets,
there was nothing there.
And he was convicted.
And he wrote in his journal following this encounter,
he said, will thy master say,
well done, good and faithful steward,
thou hast adorned thy walls with money,
which might have screened this poor creature from the cold.
Oh, justice, oh mercy,
are not these pictures
the blood of this poor maid.
Yeah, that doesn’t sting a little.
How we use our money is a reflection
of how we participate in God’s kingdom in the world.
And if we don’t engage in the difficulty of that conversation,
we’re not engaging in the spirit of that promotion.
Generosity connects to the deepest part
of being Christian, because fundamentally, we believe that Christ’s gift was a gift of generosity.
So when we use our finances for what we perceive
as advancing the kingdom of God,
we are in doing so advancing Christ’s work on the cross for us.
Moving forward,
how we talk to one another.
Recently, I’ve been doing some reading
on this idea of dehumanization.
And an author who’s been particularly meaningful to me,
Brene Brown, writes this.
Michelle Maiz defines dehumanization
as the psychological process of demonizing the enemy,
making them seem less the human and hence not
worthy of humane treatment.
Dehumanizing often starts with creating an enemy image.
As we take sides,
we lose trust and get angrier and angrier.
We not only solidify an idea of our enemy,
but we also start to lose our ability to listen,
communicate,
and practice even a modicum of empathy.
As Christians, as we seek to advance the kingdom of God,
we need to speak to people as they are.
And that is as children of God.
I don’t know if you’ve caught yourself doing this.
I know that I have.
There are people, as we all have,
who we disagree with on substantive issues.
And we believe for substantive reasons.
But the moment at which we make them an enemy and not a person,
we are doing more to make them
a demon than a child of God.
The world doesn’t need more demons.
The world needs far more children of God.
And advancing the kingdom of God is
to look at the people of the world
and to call them as they are.
Beloved,
though we think they’re wrong.
You can disagree with a person who’s still a human.
But to whatever extent we use language in a way that dehumanizes,
we therefore retract our ability
to be Christ in that situation.
So not just what we point to with our exercising of power,
but how we do that matters.
I’m going to pause here.
We have some more thoughts,
comments.
Yeah?
Learn to disagree without being disagreeable.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that’s a helpful summary.
And by the way,
in preparation for this,
I didn’t grow up Presbyterian.
So some of the Presbyterian history stuff
is always for me filling in gaps.
I went back to some of the civil rights archives.
The PCUSA does a great job of keeping archives online.
So I was looking through pictures.
And I didn’t know that the PCUSA actually
began an organization that collected– not collected–
that put together a group of clergy
from all around the country that went down south
and marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
They would go to different places.
And this group of clergy,
most of them white, as we’re Presbyterian,
most of them white
would wear their collars,
and they would walk in the parades with Martin Luther King Jr.
And let’s be honest,
that was not an easy conversation.
To march in that was not to make friends
all around the country.
It meant the exact opposite.
And that was within the ranks of Presbyterians.
So I’m not trying to simplify the complexity of this
and suggest that it should be easy.
But I am suggesting that if we aren’t brave enough to give
our voice to something,
then are we following the one who gave his life for everything?
Sorry.
So she said the idea of– well,
I want to make sure I understood you,
Lynn. But the idea that there are many mediums of communication
that you could– you can choose to talk with someone face
to face, or there’s probably a text message isn’t helpful.
So saying that some people may be uncomfortable saying
something in one context,
but they wouldn’t in another.
Except for the fact I’m now going to own to you,
I’m about to step on a soapbox.
I apologize.
So this, I think, is a significant problem
in my humble uninformed and young opinion.
We, as a people, are beginning to be tempted
that the reach of a voice is equal to the validity of that voice.
That’s what I mean by that.
When you’re watching your favorite news channel, whatever it is,
and a PhD expert on Middle East policy
gives their read on that latest speech from whatever president,
and then Jimmy Bob Joe from somewhere,
his tweet shows up next,
that should cause us to pause.
Because what we’re telling youth is
that if you put it on Twitter,
that is the same as doing something.
Or that if you say it on Facebook,
that’s the same as you understanding what you just said.
And not just credibility,
but that the idea of–
have you heard this rhetoric of taking a stand?
I’m taking a stand on this issue?
Often what that means is I tweeted 144 characters.
What a stand you took.
Right?
Martin Luther took a stand,
too.
It just so happened that he got arrested.
Right?
He had to go to trial.
If your stand doesn’t result in something,
I question what kind of stand it was.
And I believe we live in a society in which we do have
many ways that we can speak in meaningful ways.
And I don’t mean to discount that.
But I do mean to say that if you can say something
in a way that has no effect on you,
how can you be participating in the kingdom?
Stepping out of my soapbox.
Let me just share a couple other things with you quickly.
And then we’ll just open it up.
I want to say these things because we shouldn’t
take these things for granted.
The things of this congregation,
we as a congregation
seek to live into this end,
the promotion of social righteousness.
I just want to give a plug.
We’ve been partnering with Presbyterian congregations
that look different and live different from us for years,
all around the world.
And our youth,
for six years,
have been doing that with kids that look different than them
and live in different places.
And they’ve been asking faith questions with people
that they would have never asked with
if it wasn’t for the generosity of this congregation.
So mission,
sending people,
bringing people, participating in the larger institutional structure, these things matter.
This is a way that we are actively
supporting and seeking to move the bar
on social righteousness.
Every time you bring food for the food bank,
that goes to a person’s table.
We forget that.
Every time you donate a dollar in the Cherish Center baby bottle,
that goes to a girl.
That goes to a person who’s getting
trained on how to live in a way that she might not
have had access to before.
Don’t discount the ways that this congregation collects and distributes.
Just to give you context,
I ran into– the PCUSA is remarkably opaque in many ways
and unbelievably accessible in others.
And one of those is you can go and see
the budget of any congregation in the denomination.
And there’s a really big church in downtown Minneapolis.
And it’s a long story how I got to their information
in the first place.
But that church, which has a membership that would be five
times greater than this congregation,
has a mission budget of just about $100,000
more than this congregation.
Let me say that again.
Congregation five times our size has a budget
that if you work that out, that would probably
be 20% more than ours.
That’s unbelievable
what this congregation does.
Why?
Not because we’re superheroes,
not because we’re spectacular,
but because that’s integral to what we do to promoting social righteousness.
That’s helpful.
And it’s helpful to wade into this.
And I shouldn’t need to say that this comes with no attempt
to answer anything.
But it’s to say this might.
That if our work in the world does not
instigate real political backlash,
then we should question our participation
in the work of Christ.
Because it was real political backlash that killed him.
We like to think outside of historical context.
But Jesus was killed by the might of the Roman Empire
under Roman law for what were charges of inciting rebellion.
And Jesus wasn’t doing that accidentally.
I think it’s somewhat like Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
right?
Someone who wrote extensively about what
are the realities as a Christian when our ethics conflict
with the powers of the day.
And if, as Americans, we think that our faith doesn’t conflict
in some way with the political powers of the day,
it seems to me that we might be shielding ourselves,
right?
Now,
if we sat down and we were honest and vulnerable
with one another at these tables,
we would have significant disagreements
about what that action would look like.
And that’s a positive reflection,
because we gather under one axial treat,
right?
We gather under the cross of Christ.
But I would like to suggest that that doesn’t excuse us
for not taking political action.
Because if we live in a society in which we have free ability
to contribute,
then we are in some way
squandering our ability to bring that kingdom to bear
in real systemic ways.
So let me just make this really concrete.
Pastor Clinton and I talk often about some
of the gender conversation happening
throughout the country.
It happens in our denomination.
So it’s something about every three years
we have to talk about because it comes back around.
It’s an unbelievably difficult issue,
because you have two people sitting across
from each other at the table.
You’re not talking about movements.
You’re talking about people’s children.
You’re talking about their grandchildren.
You’re talking about the theology of the church
for thousands of years.
These are not simple topics,
right?
And in our public discourse,
we’re talking about refugees.
We’re talking about public safety.
We’re talking about due course of the law.
But we’re talking about people’s health care.
All of these things are in our discourse.
It seems striking to me that our Presbyterian
response to these lives in the same mediums
as some of the most vitriolic conversation.
Let me say that differently.
We’re making as many tweets as all of the other people,
and in many ways,
making no more attempt at progress.
And that should be challenging,
because historically,
Presbyterians have access to power.
We have offices at the United Nations.
We have offices in Washington, DC.
So I don’t want to say that I didn’t live in that time,
and I recognize that.
What you read in the history book’s not the same
as the experience of living it.
But it is to say that the generations that come,
seeking to be Christian today,
young people by whatever
definition you want to give,
are going to be presented with issues that to them
are issues of social justice.
And whether that will be violent or not,
I hope not,
but certainly possible,
we as Christians should still take seriously our call
to promote social righteousness.
Once again, not because we have it figured out,
but because we’re pointing to the one who gave his life for us.
Let me end my thoughts on that with this.
I don’t know how we as Reformed people cannot do this without–
I said that, and there was a nice quote on the screen,
which you can see.
I don’t know how we can promote social righteousness
without taking honestly our own brokenness and sinfulness,
because it is from that vantage point
that we can truly find humility.
Because if righteousness has been given to us as a gift,
then we have nothing to defend.
There’s no status that we need to protect.
There’s no knowledge that we need
to keep from other people.
There’s no access to the gospel that we
need to create fortresses on.
If we know our own sinfulness,
then we know the thing that we’ve got was a gift given to us,
and that gift is not for us to keep.
And to whatever extent,
our social system, however you want to define that,
though I think it needs to be political,
it also needs to be cultural.
To whatever extent that keeps others
from receiving that good news,
we should be actively working to dismantle it.
I have no clue what that looks like.
So look at the young kid talking.
But that said,
the passion of faith
should drive us into questions we don’t have answers to,
because that’s what Christians have done for thousands of years.
So faithfulness looks like engaging deep and difficult
questions and doing so in Christ’s way.
Questions, thoughts,
comments,
disagreements,
letters you’re going to write to the editor,
notes that I should be aware Clint’s going to receive tomorrow.
[laughter]
What do you think?
Nice job.
Nice job.
Nice job.
OK.
I think we all want off this hook, so–
Let’s recognize that, and let’s pray.
Not our father, we don’t have answers to lots of questions.
We often don’t even know the right questions to ask.
But we are pretty good at knowing
when we’re out of our depth of field.
And one of the great ends of the church
is to proclaim the good news of Christ,
the wholeness of Christ for the whole world.
And we live in just a small part of it.
So help us this day to take seriously that call,
to not shy away from the questions that
are bigger than our imaginations,
and to not shy away from having the courage that it takes
to engage with those who we find difficult.
For in Christ, we believe you have called us to point, to promote,
to show others the light of Christ in ways
that we could not do on our own.
And in the words of Paul, might our weakness
be an opportunity for your strength.
Might in our human fallibility,
your grace and perfect love,
the kingdom which is even now at work and alive in this earth,
might it advance to your glory and in our astonishment
that the world may point at it and that the world may say
with complete and utter confidence,
this is not their work,
but the work of Christ.
We ask it in his name.
Have a blessed evening.