Spirituality Sunday

I guess I agree with Burge.

I recently caught a glimpse of a Substack the noted researcher of American religion Ryan Burge. In his brief introduction to a larger post, Burge noted that whether people believe in God not, he would encourage them to participate in a faith community because “from a purely pro-social, pro-democracy perspective, attending a house of worship regularly is a very good thing.”

I am sure there are plenty of people who have exited their faith communities who would see things differently. I am reading a novel right now that I thought was about unattractive people in love only to discover that one of the primary reasons they consider themselves as unattractive or unwanted is because of sexual abuse they suffered in an evangelical church. Please know that I am not here to convince anyone who feels unsafe or who has been told by word or action that they are unwelcome to occupy a pew on Sunday or make the Sabbath at a local synagogue Saturday morning. Far from compelling you, let me share the shopworn advice I have offered to seekers of any religion. The moment you sense that people are using the ineffable as a means to power, get the hell out.

I am a faithful Episcopal layman, but a lot of traditional and conservative Christians would not claim me. I believe that the resurrection rightly celebrated in the Christian scriptures is a beautiful metaphor, but not embodied truth. I am far more interested in the way that Jesus radically welcomed foreigners, women rendered impure by legal or moral constraints, and compromised state agents than I am in whether a stone was rolled away. I also find it detestable when leaders use religion as a means of compulsion rather than working for an insurrection truly not of this world where medical debts are forgiven, foreigners are freed from the economic needs of their land of exile, and everyone can access the orientation towards beauty as well as the generative surge of creativity that we may call God’s favor.

I’m comfortable on the margins of the faith where I occasionally cultivate gratitude for the schema of meaning that the words and deeds of Jesus has provided. Jesus was shaped by a community that was called to be a blessing, wrestled relentlessly with powers within and without to discover what that blessing might mean, and lived exile in hope of return. “So we’re God’s chosen people,” one older Jewish man blithely asserted at a Passover Seder I attended in a Toronto community room in the spring of 2000. “I wish he would choose someone else for a while.” As a twenty-three-year-old aspiring evangelical minister, I was disturbed by this plain statement of alienation. Almost twenty-five years after that night and long past the pulpit, I often inquire of my soul, “Christ centered or Christ haunted?,” only to shrug and say, “depends on the day.”

While Jesus grew up the minority of a minority, I grew up in an empire that claimed affiliation with a Savior who proclaimed a Kingdom that belonged to the poor. We pounded nails into a Payless Cashways 2 x 4s fashioned into a cross as an expression of penance for swear words and eyes lingering on a pretty young thing, but felt no need to repent for the instability we created for people far away - the Dominicans, Salvadorans, Indonesians, and Vietnamese - to stabilize our Pax Americana.

As Dr. Jason Myers, talented scholar and a fantastic facilitator at our church’s adult education reminded us just this week, our forefathers deliberately sought to make America, with its Republic, Senate, and imperial ambitions, a new Rome. Jesus, Paul, and the early Christians were not embraced by Rome, for the Kingdom of God was quickly clocked by the Romans as a threat to their supremacy. Should Jesus followers today accommodate by word and deed the ugly America that is alienating our immigrant workforce, gleefully spewing elevated amounts of carbon into skies that night after night reveal knowledge, and threatening to exchange Medicaid coverage for widows, orphans, and people with disabilities for yet another tax cut for top wage earners?

I’ll respond with a famous counter St. Paul often employed in his letters, absolutely not!

But how does the church proceed? I think that it needs to start by identifying the idol that our country has centered on the altar of its heart. Namely, unrestrained free market capitalism.

I am no economist, but I am well aware that the business of America is business. I also know that the Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about money, capital, and resources. After all, it was the one I confess as Lord that said, “you cannot serve both God and mammon.”

I have heard plenty of sermons over the years about the benefits of giving. I could recount sermons not only about tithing, but also sermons about why the generosity of expected of Jesus followers, which we call sacrificial giving, requires even greater contributions of time, talent, and treasure.

But I have never heard a sermon in an evangelical or evangelical adjacent church about faithful living in the age of capitalism. Lest you accuse me of being too political, let me remind you that questions about remaining faithful in the midst of imperial economics landed at Jesus’s doorstep. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” he said. Following with a call to render “unto God’s what is God’s.”

I think that if the church wants to avoid capitulating to the spirit of this age, we have to square our shoulders and directly face the false gospel of capitalism. Moreover, we need to sit with the scriptures and learn how power operates in this Kingdom that belongs to the poor. This realm in which curses rebound into blessing and it is only by giving that we receive.

Fortunately, there are people who are streets ahead of me on these fronts. David Fitch recently wrote about the church and reckoning with the way power operates in God’s Kingdom. I’ve failed to get to Walter Wink’s writing on God’s upside down kingdom for far too long. For years, the Boston Faith and Justice Network has been gathering groups of Christians to practice Kingdom economics. My friends at L’Arche Boston continue to live intentionally in the faith that grace and gratitude scale best in community.

Make no mistake, I’ve been venerating the idol too. I need to repent, read some Wink, and increase my fellowship with like minded people of faith along the way.