How Did We Get Here?

How did we get here? Here being the spectacle last Monday of the President of the United States standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding up a bible just a one-minute walk from what is now known as Black Lives Plaza NW. The prelude to the spectacle was a Law & Order speech, threatening military intervention against the nationwide protestors if mayors and governors don’t get their suppression-of-the-1st-Amendment acts together. Then the spectacle was abetted when a cadre on horse and in riot gear gassed, battered, and moved mainly peaceful protestors from the area. So, just how did we get here? To partly answer that question, I need to do some personal and historical work. I’ll be as brief as I can.

A Tale of Two Stories

On December 24, 1978 my wife and I sat holding our two small children before candlelight around our Christmas tree in our home in the Niavaran section of Tehran. Outside in the street was mayhem as military forces battled revolutionaries in a struggle that would lead to the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and give way to a new Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As the violence raged, we sang Christmas carols in hope that our voices would dampen the sounds in the street.

As we held our children, two stories were being told. There was the tired old story being told in the street – a story driven by the human quest for power and dominance. It is a story as old as Cain killing his brother Abel and lives on in every place and time through formal armed conflict and in our daily lives of conflict, whether at the office, with a member of the family, or with police in riot gear in the streets. As a country whose history is steeped in war and multiple forms of conflict, we Americans know this story all too well.

The second story being told was in the words of the carols we sang. Pay attention to this verse:

Hail the heav’n born Prince of peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all he brings, ris’n with healing in his wings.

Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die,

born to raise each child of earth, born to give us second birth.

Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn king!”

This counter-story speaks of a God of infinite grace who comes to us not as a tyrant, bully or bearing arms but as a defenseless baby declaring amnesty to a world trapped in the consequences of our sin and participation in evil. The hymnwriter Charles Wesley stood on this side of the empty tomb and chose to already declare in a Christmas carol a crucified Jesus risen with “healing.”  The words of this carol express a gospel which brings life and light to ALL, raises up each child of earth, and makes it possible for us to experience a second birth – a do over – as people in the world. Maybe we would get it right this time.

These two stories are completely different in the worldview they present and the allegiances of each story’s followers. They both cannot be true. One cannot embrace both stories. Allegiance to one story puts you at odds with the other.

The Jesus Movement is Born

When the women first ran from the empty tomb preaching the first sermon, “Jesus is risen,” and when the Spirit would birth the Jesus movement that became the church, the early followers knew the distinction between the two stories. They knew that they were in the world but not of it. When they gathered, they confessed that the crucified and risen Jesus was Lord and not Caesar. They lived by radically different norms than the society around them and in which they still had to daily participate. When they gathered for worship, the celebration of the Eucharist was crucial for forging their identity and calling as people who not only bear witness to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus but also to the eschatological promises the meal represents - “a foretaste of the feast to come.” The most prevalent biblical image of the outcome of the human story is that of a banquet – an all-inclusive party – in which God wipes away every tear, ends suffering and death, and swallows up everything that would divide us, demean us, or crush us. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the down payment of that promise and the Eucharist is liturgically participating in it as if the future is already here.

We know the church was eventually persecuted and endured terrorizing brutalization because of its unwillingness to declare Caesar as Lord and his empire as God-ordained. Living out of its story, the church continued to hold to the words of one of its earliest hymns:

Let the same mind be among you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself… and humbled himself…   (Philippians 2:5-8)

The Movement Gets Sick

I know something about malignancy. Were it not for a drug I take every night, I would be dead from an incurable form of leukemia. When I sat in my hematologist’s office for my first consultation after a bone marrow biopsy confirmed the malignancy, she told me I probably had had the disease for quite a while before a routine annual physical detected something wrong in my bloodwork. Two things are instructive here: 1) The disease formed in my bone marrow where blood cells are produced and where healthy cells became malignant. 2) I had the disease without knowing it. So, I lived with a lethal disease originating in the very core of my body and did not even know it.

In the early 4th Century, the bone marrow of Christianity began to get sick. In a dramatic development in the relationship of the Roman Empire to the Jesus movement, Emperor Constantine, wanting the Christian God’s assistance in battle along the empire’s perimeter, made a deal that would soon result in his mandating Christianity as the official religion of the empire. In quick order the two distinct irreconcilable stories became one. As we fast forward through western European history, the marriage resulted in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. Bishops and secular leaders became interchangeable in their leadership of the agenda of the empire. Constantine presided over the Council at Nicaea. Bishops led armies into battle. “Onward Christian Soldiers!”

Instead of Christianity providing an alternative story out of which to live in contrast to any worldly form of power and dominance, it became a prop for the empire’s agenda. Likewise, the empire’s support of the church gave it power, a power that corrupted. The malignant church of the empire meant spiritual support for conquering and subjugating the “infidel” beyond its borders. It meant occupying, dominating, and exploiting “the other.” The agenda was carried out with the assurance that the empire’s will was the will of God. It was “us,” the superior, versus “them.”  

American Malignant Christianity

The Reformation launched in the 16th century was directed at much of the corruption within the church and eventually led to widespread reformation and counter-reformations. But as with empire Christianity, the fuel for the Reformation movement was often as much nationalism as theology. When Europeans came to America to settle, they carried the malignancy.

The conflation of an empire-formed Christianity with the sense of cosmic specialness (i.e. Manifest Destiny) held by white Americans has resulted in a deadly malignancy. It was malignant Christianity that sanctioned the genocide of native peoples, the slave trade and America’s deep sin of slavery, the deprivation of rights to women, the resistance to civil rights movements, forms of hatred and exclusion towards members of the LGBTQIA community and the Law and Order agenda. It is malignant Christianity that justifies the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world. With 4.4% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 22% of the world’s incarcerated, with blacks having an imprisonment rate at five times that of whites.

It is also malignant Christianity that justifies our God-loving country hanging onto the death penalty, a distinction shared only with Belarus in the modern western world. It is malignant Christianity that justifies incoming travel bans against certain peoples, building a wall at our southern border, and separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. Moreover, it is malignant Christianity that is complicit in America being the most violent country in the world in terms of gun violence and gun ownership. It was just two years ago at the NRA prayer breakfast in Dallas where a keynoter wore a shirt proclaiming, “Jesus loves me and my guns” and declaring that owning an assault rifle was a God-given right.    

The hold that American Malignant Christianity has on our culture is akin to the knee that pressed down on George Floyd’s neck for almost 9 minutes. And if you think my portrait of American malignant Christianity is just hyperbole, talk to any pastor who has initiated a discussion in a God-fearing and Bible-believing church about moving the American flag out of the sanctuary. There is a reason in this turbulent season the President of the United States thought a photo of him holding a Bible would be a good idea.

Being Saved

In the 3rd chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus is visited at night by a leader of the Jewish council. His name is Nicodemus, and he is struggling to spiritually understand what Jesus is doing and saying. Jesus speaks to him about being born again. (Or being born anew or born from above. The Greek word used by Jesus can be translated multiple ways.) Malignant Christianity has taken this exchange and turned it into a form of individual salvation, even defining what one must do to make a deal with God that ensures entrance into heaven after death. Jesus was concerned with something else, the repentance of God’s people. The “you” who must be born again in the Greek text is plural. It is “you,” collective people of God. “You” must recover your identity and calling. That will take an entire rebirth. You are the ones chosen to be light to the world, showing the world how we all live on this planet in love and goodness with one another. It is through you whom all the people of the world are to be blessed. For God so loved the world that God sent the only son to save it. God did not send the son to condemn it. God did not send the son to make a deal. God sent the son to bring life and healing for all. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; we are all one in Christ Jesus. All means ALL.

Being saved means we repent from all the ways that we have tried to convince ourselves that God has aligned with our agenda and schemes and instead we align ourselves with God’s, which is to bring healing and wholeness to all the world. We must resist all forms of Malignant Christianity with treatment. Just as my nightly regimen of Imatinib shuts off my malignant cells’ ability to emit an enzyme to reproduces more malignancy, our treatment against the sickness of Malignant Christianity is Jesus – what Jesus did for us, and more importantly what he did to us. He changed everything, and we must too.

We must resist by speaking the truth. If the last two weeks have shown us anything, there is a spirit blowing through this nation. Young and old and black and white are being summoned to a movement. The church that bears witness to the crucified and risen Lord has something to say. Preachers out there, speak the truth. Do not be partisan but do be political. Jesus was political. Look at his own declared agenda. Look at his speeches. Look at those with whom he dined and embraced. Look at the systems of injustice to which he spoke “woes.” Jesus was a protestor. His Sermon on the Mount announced a change of affairs. His entry into Jerusalem was a protest march. He attack on the temple was a demonstration. He took sides with the poor, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. He spoke truth to power. He was lynched by both the government and the religious people, but God raised him up. He rose again because love and life for all people finally win.

What is it that God requires of us? To do justice, and love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,