A Sermon for the 4th of July: All Those Times in Church
All those times in church when we read a passage from the Bible, we’ll stop right before something really strange or disturbing happens. For instance, in church we do read about God speaking to Moses from the burning bush about his mission to liberate the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, (Exodus, chapters 3-4), but never that part just after the burning bush episode, where God tries to kill Moses and only stops on account of Moses’ wife Zipporah laying her son’s bloody foreskin at Moses’ feet. (Ex. 4:24)
Or we do sing the beautiful and haunting first six verses of Psalm 137, as the Israelites “sit by the rivers of Babylon and weep” refusing to “never forget Jerusalem.” But we never utter those infamous closing curses against the Bablyonians: “Fortunate the man who will seize and dash your little ones against the rock!” (137:9)
Oh, I know, you’ll say to me, but we do read that strange and awful story of the Lord commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Yes. But that’s really the exception that proves the rule. Because we always insist on reading that particular story to its (somewhat) happy ending, where we witness the merciful angelic hand staying Abraham’s knife. (Genesis 22: 1-19)
All this is to say that the actual text of the Bible troubles. Unsettles. But we in church so often repeat the parts we (think) we know and make the text our pet. Cuddly. Comforting.
And yet the God of scripture does not (often) want to lick our faces.
From the depths I cry to you the Psalmist cries in another verse (Psalm 130). And there the writer means from the depths of the sea. Where Jonah lay in the belly of a whale. Where Peter feared he’d end up when he was walking on the water (Matthew 14: 30-33) trying to follow his master. The sea. Which to this day claims so many seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
You are that man! The prophet Nathan says to King David after the King has seduced and murdered. (2 Samuel 12:7) And this story is famous enough for us to read at church, famous enough for us people in the pews to remember the story but forget that we are David, the seducer, the murderer. We inherit David’s story but refuse to let it sink in. Refuse to believe that the story of the Davidic mini-empire in Israel is anything like our own American empire and its sordid story of colonization and slavery.
My wife and I just watched Dune the other night. Not knowing anything about the novel it was based on before watching it, I was struck by how much the story had to say about colonization: all of these separate and warring ‘houses’ of an empire vying to take control of a natural-resource rich land (planet). I mentioned to Cristina that I’d been reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, and the movie reminded me of all of Galeano’s examples of the ways European nations exploited the natural resources (coffee, sugar, gold, silver etc.) of these lands, and then deprived the indigenous peoples who worked the lands of any benefit of those resources.
“And it’s especially troubling because the colonizers did this with the blessing of the missionaries and the Church,” I said.
Cristina stared at me. “Um, Yeah. I thought everyone knows that,” she said.
And she was right, of course.
Everyone knows that the United States stole the land from Native Americans and divvied it up into separate plots for white European settlers to occupy. Everyone knows that the United States took Native American children from their parents and sent them to boarding schools across the country, in order to prevent them from learning and internalizing the wisdom of their parents. Everyone knows the United States called this process of culture-killing “assimilation” or “kill the Indian, save the man” (Lt. Colonel Richard Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian Boarding School). Everyone knows that this theft of land and this genocide was largely but not totally successful. For just as the Israelite people could not be totally eradicated or destroyed when an Empire (be it Babylonian or Roman or Egyptian) attempted to destroy them, so many indigenous peoples of the Americas survived, even when modern colonial Empires like the American one tried their damndest to destroy them.
But our churches, across the conquered and colonized lands, seem to be intent on burying this knowledge. How else to explain how many of them let fly the flags of the different nation-states that eradicated and genocided so many people?
And this is despite the fact that the Bible is straightforwardly AGAINST the nation-state and all of its myth-making. Its authors refuse to let the Israelite people see their own kings or kingdom in anything but their broken and flawed true state throughout the Old Testament. And then in the New Testament, Jewish followers of Jesus now extend that critique of nation-state to all empires, most pertinently the Roman Empire which at the moment currently ‘ruled’ much of the world, but which Jesus and his followers showed, did not have God’s power.
And everybody can have the gospel, which means everybody also can have the radical self-and-nation critique.
Yes, I know I’m painting with broad strokes. But (in case you haven’t noticed) I’m writing this piece in the mode of a sermon, the kind I never hear from the pulpit but feel I need to.
What I’m saying is that when I read the Bible, I am disturbed, discomforted, and (in my good moments) moved to action. The text provokes these things; in my view, when read with care, it is a truthful text. And yet, much of the time, I don’t have this experience in church. And I conclude (and I include myself in this conclusion by the way) that this is because we churchgoers are so often not truthful. Not fully truthful anyway. At the same time, I believe that deeper down than our evasions, we actually want the truth, all of it. Because life itself is confusing, disturbing, and frightening, and always has been. (In addition to being filled with joy and laughter and good things, too.) Because love, which is the Biblical text’s last word, and a word we are enjoined to enflesh with our own words and actions, needs the truth for us to fully know and be fully known.
Maybe that would be a good line to end on if we were in church, but we’re not. And reading that last paragraph over, I find it as abstract and airy as anything any preacher I’ve ever heard utter! So let me deflate my own rhetoric. Bring us back down to earth with a couple stories.
First, my own childhood experience with the bible. I received The Catholic Children’s Living Bible as a gift from my parents before my first communion at age 9. But don’t let the “children’s” part fool you. It was unabridged, only paraphrased, kind of like the No Fear Shakespeare editions I’ll sometimes give to classes of students I teach if I don’t think they can handle the original. (Am I a hypocrite? Very well I’m hypocritical. My sermon is large. It contains multitudes.) Anyway, the “translator’s” note at the beginning of The Catholic Children’s Living Bible (which was followed by a portrait of a beaming Pope John Paul II) encouraged me to read it, verse by verse, book by book. I was a good little boy in those days, and so I began to do just that.
And boy was I surprised by what I found!
Right off the bat, in the first book, Genesis, I noticed there were characters and stories in this Bible that I never saw in the illustrated children’s version I had been given (and read) just a few years before. There were lots of killings and sex (although I probably wouldn’t have used that word) and God was very upset most of the time. And betrayal (going back on your word) seemed to be the big theme of the book.
But more than any of that, Genesis was just interesting. Honestly, it was entertaining. The main teaching or “moral” I gathered from reading was “listen to God” or even more clear: “obey God” (or you’re going to get it.) That general takeaway held as I continued to read through the Old Testament.
Because I was much more systematic and perfectionistic as a nine year old than I am now as a 41 year old, I would keep track of each book I finished with a little check mark (in pencil) in the table of contents of my Bible. So, for instance, I see that I finished reading during that year, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but skipped Judges. I read Judges, Ruth, 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and Second Kings, but skipped 1st and 2nd Chronicles. And while I read Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, I skipped almost all of the major prophets, except Isaiah. And looking at the check mark system in the New Testament, nine-year old me read the Gospels and Acts, but for the most part stayed away from Paul’s letters.
Family dinners were a regular thing in our house, and I remember sharing what I was reading during meals. And my surprise about the gory details of what was in there was shared by my parents (mom more interested than dad at the point in my bible reading). My brothers, as I remember it, more or less shrugged their shoulders.
A recent experience in the classroom got me thinking about these old memories. One of my AP English classes had the privilege of “Zooming” with Father Joseph Brown, SJ. The ostensible reason for our Zoom conversation was that this class had just finished reading and watching August Wilson’s play, Fences, a play Father Brown has a deep knowledge of. (He even played Troy Maxson in a Southern Illinois University production in 2006.) But as I think Father Brown is aware, more important than any ‘text’ at hand is the opportunity for connecting a wise elder like him to the students I teach. The text is a pretext for that connection, that relationship.
During this particular conversation, one of the students mentioned a line Father Brown had said recently in a speech I’d shared with them. (He’d been speaking to a group of high schoolers at Brebeuf Jesuit in Indiana in honor of Martin Luther King Day.) Father Brown said in that speech, “You [students] are not the future. You are the present.” The student I teach was deeply moved by that line and wanted to hear more of what Father Brown had to say on it. He had a lot to say!
I’m going from memory, and at this point, this “Zoom” call was a few months ago, so Father Brown (who thankfully reads this Substack) can correct my memory where it errs. But I remember him sharing a particular memory of being told by his mother that he was “too young” to read a novel he’d checked out from the library, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Father Brown obeyed his mother’s wish to return the book–but finished the novel on his bus ride to the library. And in doing so discovered what his mother thought he was too young to read: a woman, seeing a homeless man hungry and in need of food, feeds him from her own breasts. Needless to say, Father Brown did not believe he was “too young” to read that episode.
Then Father Brown went on to share other stories from his childhood and growing up, and these others showed ways his parents honored and wanted to learn from his and his sister’s experience as the only Black students in an otherwise all-white Catholic school system in 1950s Milwaukee. The first Black students there, they desegregated the system.
The students and I were struck by Father Brown’s recounting of his parent’s attitude toward this moment in his and his sister’s life: Father Brown’s parents communicated that they were not able to understand the depth of what their children were experiencing on a daily basis. But they said that they wanted to know and hear from their own children at family dinners what this experience felt like. And so, Father Brown and his sister would share, and their parents would listen.
The simplicity and generosity of this act of listening moves me. As does what it implied about the way Father Brown’s parents approached him and his sister. Namely, that they took him and his sister seriously. That they honored his and his sister’s experience.
To return to the thread I began this essay / sermon with: reading or (or rather not reading) the difficult parts of the Bible at church. In my view, when we say of our children, or of ourselves, that we cannot handle the fullness of the double-edged sword of scripture, we are essentially saying we cannot handle the fullness of our own lives and the lives of our children. We are managing our lives, and the lives of our children, rather than living them, or teaching our children to live their lives.
Management is not the way to maturity, or to liberation.
Let they who have ears to hear, hear. (And let me be the first to hear my own sermon.)
And as my students say, “thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.”
Peace.
Notes:
-I wrote this essay to honor the life and witness of three priests (wise elders in every sense of that phrase) who preach the word, in season and out of season, and have inspired in various ways, this essay: Father Joseph Brown, SJ, and Saint Paul West-siders Father Marc Boulos (St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church), and Father Steve Adrian (St. Matthew’s Catholic Church).
-I mentioned in my video introduction the amazing resource, Catholic Women Preach, that Cristina and I listened to during the pandemic when we didn’t go to church. Regardless of your faith persuasion, I think it’s worth a look and listen.
Once again, Zach Czaia honors me with a wonderful reference. And I am confirming his account of how my sister and I desegregated a Catholic grade school in 1957 (in Beloit, Wisconsin), when she was in the 3rd grade and I was in the 7th grade. My mother and father did sit me down, to tell me that they had never experienced any of what I would be dealing with in school. "We don't know what you will deal with; but we are family, and you can bring everything to us and will will be there for you." I live with that blessing all these years later. Thank you, Zach for bringing me opportunities to share those feelings with the children the ancestors have sent us to guide us into our common future.