A Better World

Category: Religio-governmental violence

  • Christmas: Sentimentality and Self-centeredness

    Christmas has probably never been much about Jesus

    As important as Christmas Eve services were to many of my congregants across the years and despite my earnest desires to be creative and fresh while capturing the true spirit of Christmas lore, I misfired frequently, leaving some disappointed and others frustrated, even angry on occasion. My detractors might very well point out that if I had only stuck to “the basics,” everyone would’ve been happy or most everyone. (Complete congregational happiness is a nonexistent state.) Read on please, and decide if I deserve(d) compliments or criticism.

    During two consecutive annual Christmas Eve services, I was so heavy-hearted with the tragedies and catastrophes in the world (and this was long before Trump and his demons made things so much worse than I could ever have imagined), I turned a lessons and carols format into a lessons, carols, and current events service. For those who stay away from churches for whatever reason, let me explain very briefly.

    A service of lessons and carols alternates traditional biblical readings ostensibly related to Christmas with Christmas music—congregational carols and choral along with instrumental holiday music at its best. I simply tweaked that by working in readings from news stories about circumstances nationally and internationally that desperately needed to be transformed by, let’s call it, the Christmas spirit.

    I included readings about hunger and homelessness on our doorsteps and around the world, the ravages of active warring, neglected and otherwise abused infants and young children, among others. I thought I with long-suffering musicians created social justice masterpieces, which, after all, honor the life and teachings of Jesus more than a nativity scene. Following the second one of these two services, my deacon chairperson was sent as an emissary from the larger deacon board representing more than a few congregants to tell me that the “depressive approach” to Christmas Eve was not what they needed or wanted. I heard.

    The next Christmas Eve, I tried my hand, as I have done on a few occasions, at setting the dynamics of the birth of Jesus stories in a modern more or less parallel context. This first effort had Mary as a teen, unwed mother-to-be (which was exactly how Jesus’ mother found herself) with her presumptive husband desperately trying to find a place for their baby to be born after having been turned away by the absolutely overcrowded ER of a small city’s only hospital. The only place they could find at hand as the birth was imminent was an unoccupied crack house near the hospital.

    Some of my hearers were thrilled with the re-creation, envisioning (could’ve been wishful thinking) a career change for me to become a prominent writer of short stories. Others were unimpressed. And one person, who never attended any other services throughout the year, absolutely hated it and used my story as an excuse to declare that he would not attend services at our church anymore.

    In defeat, the next few Christmas Eve services I went back to those tried and true basics, even though I did not think re-hearing the same predictable scriptural texts did justice to what actually occurred or to the implications of being a follower of the adult Jesus. This approach was a lot less work for me at an already busy time of year, so fine—even though I felt I was betraying the original storytellers and the spirit of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

    Now retired from the pastorate, those tensions are no longer my worries. Christmas can now be an entirely innocuous experience without concern for anyone other than my family and myself. Alas, neither my brain nor my conscience allow that.

    My hunches during those depressive Christmas Eve services had been correct. A plastic or a wood-carved or a stained glass baby Jesus may stir our hearts to sentimentality, and as tender and touching as that may well be these absolutely do not honor Jesus of Nazareth or the life he lived or his powerful teachings that, against the odds, were preserved for centuries upon centuries after the facts.

    Can you imagine having a child of your own and celebrating nothing about that child beyond her or his birth? Can you imagine being the parent of an adult child who is working her or his ass off and taking all kinds of risks and dealing with enormous sacrifices in order to try to make the world a better place and still finding nothing to celebrate other than your child’s birth?

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with finding reasons to celebrate family and sharing gifts or not. There is certainly nothing wrong with singing songs about peace on earth. But if there is no concern with trying to bring the teachings of Jesus to bear on pressing national and international situations with a particular focus on the kinds of peripheral people for whom Jesus showed relentless compassion and concern, then we are not celebrating the essentials of Jesus’ life, including his birth. What we have on our hands instead is a Christ-less Christmas.

    When I first began hearing frequently slogans about keeping Christ in Christmas I was stirred. The concern behind the slogans was well taken as thoughtful people were noticing that, in the first world at least, Christmas was a lot more about consumerism than about Jesus. I rarely saw, even from those who created or repeated the slogans, much in Christmas celebrations that had anything at all to do with Jesus of Nazareth, and that hasn’t changed.

    If we were actually informed/challenged by the teachings of Jesus, at Christmas time we would redouble our efforts to demonstrate active concern (meaning, lip-service doesn’t count) for those suffering from overt injustice, as well as those who have been or are being neglected, ignored, swept to the edges of societal awareness. And preachers worth listening to, many are not, would be prophetically condemning the Trump/MAGAt/bipartisan political abuse of children, senior adults, immigrants and other ICE victims of all ages, the poor, the hungry, the homeless, targets of gun violence and war and genocide.

    Nostalgic Christmas carols and preoccupation with angels sweetly singing are literally ludicrous unless we first fight the evils Jesus fought. Maybe to keep us focused we should change our Christmas tree ornaments from Santas and candy canes and stars to Venezuelan fishing boats and miniature ICE detention cells and figurines of emaciated infants and homeless people shivering in the cold.

    —David Albert Farmer

  • A letter to Martin Luther on the 508th anniversary of his 95 points of contention with Pope Leo X and the Roman Catholic Church

    A tainted heritage

    Herr Dr. Luther,

    One of your Protestant theological descendants here. I’m thinking about you on this anniversary date—October 31, 1517–of your courageous challenge to the Pope, with your Wittenberg posting of the 95 theses for debate with the Church hierarchy.

    Let me be quick to say that I hope the next world resolves problems in the way those of us still living on planet Earth believe that it will. If so, I trust that your severe constipation is entirely a thing of the past, and even forgotten by you, though, with the help of archaeologists who uncovered your toilet those of us today can hardly forget where the Protestant Reformation was actually born.

    You would perhaps be disappointed to learn that the Roman Catholic Church is still in existence worldwide, and despite its many failures across the years at the moment has a magnificent Pope. You might well disagree with my assessment, but I hold firmly to it. Another Leo he is, the fourteenth one of those, and a far better Leo than the one you knew.

    I need to put my assessment in context for you and say that both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant movement as well as all other institutional expressions of Christianity have, by this point in history, failed to be anything appropriately representative of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, or even close. They’re all failed enterprises, and the effort to continue trying to make them work is doing untold damage to the potential of the teachings of Jesus to make the world better, to make the world right.

    I’m sorry to have to tell you that, despite your good intentions, your efforts largely became in vain. This has been the case not because the teachings of Jesus properly interpreted have lost power or even because the Apostle Paul’s institutional follow up to those teachings lacked reasonable merit, but because the relationship of government to any spirituality movement is inherently flawed. Spirituality and civil governance simply cannot mix. They cannot become intertwined.

    Your declaration in an appearance before Pope Leo X that your conscience was captive to the word of God has caused admiration and courage to well up in the hearts of many of your spiritual descendants, myself included. The problem with that is not with your motivation or your articulation or your brilliance. It was and is with the fact that scripture must be interpreted correctly, and it has been and remains difficult for scholars and preachers to give much credence to the notion that their own interpretations, however well-informed, could be wrong, can be wrong.

    Your belief, and if I may say so respectfully, Sir, that Romans chapter 13 could ever have been intended by the Apostle Paul to be applied in all situations and all circumstance was untenable and remains so. Even between the time Paul wrote that to the church in Rome and the time that Nero ordered him executed, he realized in the most painful way possible that God does not put evil people in leadership positions. For that matter, God doesn’t get involved in politics at all. Given your own suffering at the hands of self-serving political power people it is difficult to understand how you arrived at that conclusion, and especially that it would apply in all circumstances, including in your own.

    Professor, when you, a theological leader in the literal world of your time, called on political power people to harm your enemies—namely peasants and Jews—and their causes, you went to a place Jesus would never have gone or approved of. Protestants after you, and many more of them than anyone could have imagined, took your cue and believed they too had the right to ask politicians to enforce theological belief and behavior. That was a fatal flaw.

    When Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,” he was not merely talking about paying Roman-assessed taxes by people it held in subjugation. He was talking about understanding the difference between two realms of human experience. One of those realms is the earthly realm that has political leaders, and to the extent that we want or have to live within those spheres we must follow the rules. But the other realm, the spiritual realm, is God‘s realm, and the politicians have absolutely nothing to do with what is believed or talked about or acted upon in that realm.

    The country in which I live today was not known to you, and would not be known to many except the indigenous people who lived here until the discoveries of your European near-contemporaries became widely known. But its original inhabitants were eventually savagely abused, even slaughtered, by Protestants and Roman Catholics alike stealing what was theirs. A shameful heritage.

    In my own time, Protestants more than Roman Catholics have commandeered the government and are attempting to force people to live by their rules; that force, based primarily on racial and cultural prejudice, includes violence and unconscionable abuse, including murder, of our citizens and guests of all ages. Dr. Luther, your progeny believe that the use of governmental muscle to enforce what they believe to be religious principles is acceptable, and they learned of it in part because of the precedent you set. I’m not sure how you can rest easy in paradise knowing this.

    If God is indeed our mighty fortress—a bulwark never falling, then beyond appreciation to government for ensuring freedom of religious expression, the government is unrelated and must remain unrelated to our spiritual lives. You sang it powerfully.

    And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.

    The truth makes us and keeps us free, yes? Not religio-governmental violence.

    —David Albert Farmer, Ph.D.