Sincerely Wrong (4th Sunday of Easter; Acts 9:1-19; April 22, 2018)

Sincerely Wrong

4th Sunday of Easter
Acts 9:1-19
April 22, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There is nothing more dangerous than a true believer.

That is an odd thing for me to say and especially odd for me to say it here. I am professionally obligated to be in favor of religion and faith, or so it would seem. Nonetheless, I think it's important, especially in our era, to acknowledge that religion has a dark side. I can point to a number of episodes in our history that show that Christianity is certainly not guiltless in its involvement in the dark side of religion.

• As early as the fifth century, the Christian church used imperial power to suppress dissent and disagreement in the church.
• In the late eleventh century and running for the next two centuries, the Western Church launched a series of crusades, one of them directed at dissenting Christians in the southern part of France.
• Beginning shortly after the Protestant Reformation and ending only in 1792 with the execution of Anna Göldi,¹ some 40,000 so-called witches were put to death.²
• From 1492 to 1900, the native population of what became the United States was reduced from 5 to 10 million to 238,000³ by a combination of disease, slaughter, and starvation carried out by Christians under the cover of Christian theology in order to take the land that had belonged to the Indigenous people, land that includes the land this church building rests on.
• Some 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and transported to the Americas. About 450,000 were eventually shipped to the United States.⁴ The labor of these and the millions of their descendants was stolen by a system that received the blessings of the Christian churches, our tradition among them.
• A number of prominent Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham are framing our military involvement in the Middle East as a religious war pitting Christian America against the Muslim Near East.⁵[5] And it is quite possible that their opinion is shared in high places.

As a Christian I would like nothing more than to be able to put a great deal of distance between my understanding of Christianity and these manifestations of it. You might be able to offer me suggestions about how to do that. One suggestion I will refuse is any argument that begins with the words, "But what about..." If that is what you were going to offer, I ask that you try another approach.

All the major religious traditions that I know anything about have a problem with violent extremism. The Christian tradition is neither more nor less guilty than any other, as far as I know. And we here today are Christians talking about a problem that our tradition has. Deflecting blame or responsibility for our tradition will not be helpful.

"True believers" are dangerous. Or are certain people dangerous for other reasons and I'm just blaming the danger on their religion? Could we turn to Saul of Tarsus (as he is known in our reading) for some insight?

Saul was certainly committed to his cause. He was not content to argue against followers of the Way nor to limit himself to making the case for some other particular way of being a Jew. Saul had guarded the overcoats of those who participated in the mob act of violence against the Christian deacon Stephen. Even that wasn't enough. So Saul, a Pharisee, went to the high priest, a member of a Jewish party bitter opposed to the Pharisees, to get warrants for the arrest of anyone connected with this "Way" or showing too much interest in Jesus.

Saul's behavior isn't uncommon in the history of religion. Far from it. It's actually pretty predictable, because it happens more often at some times than at others. It happens whenever a group senses that its identity is threatened. Often those threats come from outside. Certainly the Romans represented a threat to the identity of the people called Jews.

The Roman presence in Palestine was overwhelming. It was a military threat that could and did explode into violence at the least provocation. It was an economic threat that overwhelmed the local markets, forced peasants off their land, indebted families, and deprived the people of any way to earn a living. It was a religious threat that honored gods who deserved no honor and gave them credit for Roman power. It was a cultural threat that surrounded them with a sophistication they could not possibly match. There was little that Jews could do to resist these threats.

In circumstances like this one thing that people often resort to is turning their focus on their own group. They will search out those who don't fit, who disturb the unity of the group, or who seem to have sold out. Saul, like so many others before and since, has come to the--perhaps unconscious--conclusion that the way to defend the identity of his group is to purify it of all that contaminates it. He decided that the followers of the Way were one such contaminate that must be cleansed from the Jewish community at any cost.

In his experience there was no arguing with Jesus-followers. They would hold their vile opinions even in the face of death. Stephen died joyfully.

There was no redemption for people like that. So, in Saul's logic, they would have to be arrested, tried, and killed. Or maybe just killed. He had certainly been satisfied with that result when the victim was Stephen.

Motivated in this way it was impossible for him to imagine that Jesus and the followers of the Way might have something to contribute to the identity of Judaism, that they might make it stronger, rather than weaker. Jesus, after all, had focused on a few key values and commitments that embodied what to him was the heart of the covenant life with God. He sought to reform Jewish life, to reinvigorate it, to offer to the Jewish people an alternative way of being human, a way that conformed to the heart of God's dream.

In this way Saul's persecution of Jesus-followers was the result of a failure of imagination. He just could not see the life that Jesus had offered. He just could not see that there was, even in that strenuous time, a path that was truly human. Jesus had marked it out, but Saul couldn't see it.

In our story the blindness doesn't come until later, until after the light, and the voice, and the demand, "Saul, Saul, why are you harassing me?" It wasn't until Saul had his instructions and the light and the voice had faded that Saul opened his eyes and discovered that he could not see.

But Saul was blinded long before that. When he could no longer see variety as a gift. When he refused to see the blessed messiness that was ancient Judaism. When he would not see what he could have seen, he was as blind as it is possible to be. And this was precisely because, in his imagination, he saw with blinding clarity.

We've seen that happen in our own country as we have faced a world less under our control, a world that seems more dangerous, even if it is not. This comes at a time when many are struggling to make their way in the world that globalization and rule by the rich have produced. It is a real temptation in this time to turn our eyes inward and find an element that we can plausibly take to be an alien one. Some of us feel compelled in that direction. Our attention focuses on anything that seems to threaten the white, straight, Christian image that we have of our country's history and imaginable future, and we react with fear and loathing. Some of us are maddened to the point of violence or, if not to actual violence, then to turning a blind eye to the violence of others. Two black men cannot wait for a friend in a Starbucks without being arrested and detained for fifteen hours. Another black man is killed because the implicit bias of the officers blinds them to everything except the terror they feel because the man they are mistakenly pursuing is black. And many of us simply shrug our shoulders. If these are injustices, well, they are necessary injustices to protect our safety, and especially the safety of our image of who we are.

Or we imagine that immigrants from Latin America are "rapists, murderers, and drug dealers" and that the presence of undocumented immigrants makes us less safe. Our fears justify any sort of action. They spur us to build a wall to keep an imagined impurity at bay. (Take it from this historian, that no empire has ever built a wall that succeeded in keeping people out of a place they wanted to be in.) They spur us to contemplate expelling some millions of undocumented people. They allow us to turn our eyes away from the inhumanity of the way we treat desperate people, splitting families apart, misinforming them of their rights, and exiling people whose only home is among us to places they have never lived, whose languages they do not speak, and whose culture they do not understand. Our fears become a kind of scale that covers our eyes and keeps us from being able to see.

Our own United Methodist Church, like all mainline denominations, has struggled numerically since the heyday of civil religion in the 1960's. The Church as we have known it has become increasingly irrelevant to life in the early twenty-first century. Even the Southern Baptists who just twenty years ago were gloating over us, are shrinking in numbers. A few mega-churches have attracted attention, but I cannot forget that giantism is sometimes the last evolutionary gambit before extinction.

Some in our church are convinced that the problem is that our denomination lacks the theological purity it needs to survive and thrive. They are determined to purify United Methodism of those pesky progressives. The "issue" of LGBT folks' life and ministry in our midst is only the presenting issue. The real subject of their concern lies with some peoples' failure to understand the authority of Scripture in the way that they do. They distrust the movement of the Spirit that leads pastors and congregations toward a more radical love toward the world. They see these things with blinding clarity. They have blinded themselves into believing that the secret of growing the church is to tear it in two.

Saul, having seen with blinding clarity, can no longer even direct his feet onto his own path, let alone his fellow Jews toward the Path, the Torah. He has to be led into Damascus by the ICE agents assigned to his mission. His sight and his future fall into the hands of the unsung hero of the story, Ananias, a follower of the Way who is terrified at being asked to present himself to the persecutor of the Way as a follower of the Way. Saul "has done horrible things" to the community in Jerusalem. We would not blame him for refusing the assignment.

But he does not let his fear blind him to the possibilities. He went to Saul. He laid his hands on him. The flakes that had blinded Saul fell away, and Saul could see. It says that he could see again. But maybe Saul sees in a way that he has never seen before. I think so. May the same be said of us all.

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1 Ben Panko, “Last Person Executed as a Witch in Europe Gets a Museum,” Smithsonian, accessed April 21, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/last-witch-executed-europe-gets-museum-180964633/.

2 Jamie Doward, “Why Europe’s Wars of Religion Put 40,000 ‘witches’ to a Terrible Death,” the Guardian, January 7, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/witchcraft-economics-reformation-catholic-protestant-market-share.

3 Donald L. Fixico, “When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization,’” HISTORY.com, accessed April 21, 2018, http://www.history.com/news/native-americans-genocide-united-states.

4 Henry Louis Gates Jr, “How Many Slaves Landed in the US?,” The Root, accessed April 21, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us-1790873989.

5 Muqtedar Khan, “Preachers of Bigotry,” Brookings (blog), November 30, 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/preachers-of-bigotry/.