The World’s and the Church’s Insanity by Mark Rich

I recently read a smart article by a law professor at Columbia Tim Wu, The Oppression of the Supermajority. He pointed out the thing that we all kind of know, but it has become very uncouth to say: what unites Americans in terms of policy is far, far greater than what divides them.

“About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leave attracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.

“The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority…

“In our era, it is primarily Congress that prevents popular laws from being passed or getting serious consideration… Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests.”

I first got most directly introduced to the insanity of the world back in the late 1980s. Cynthia and I had moved to North Dakota, and I was serving a three-point parish in the midst of, as it happened, a nuclear missile installation connected to the Air Force base in Grand Forks. Every Sunday morning I would carry the gospel of life to these three churches, one in town and two in the country, while driving right past four or five nuclear missile silos, the gods of death. Each contained one missile bearing three independently-targeted nuclear warheads. Each of these nuclear bombs was fully functional, armed, and targeted. Each warhead, were it to strike a city, was capable of instantly exterminating anywhere from a half-million to a million human beings.

The “strategy” behind this madness was literally called MAD – mutually assured destruction. All the “experts” and politicians believed this was fully necessary, and it constituted the most serious public policy known as “security.”

In truth it was nothing other than pure insanity (the biblical word is ‘wrath’), cooked up by the very few, in many countries, in order to hold most of the world under their control, enthralled in the macabre charm of death. In this way these few procured obscene power for evil, while the rest of us paid for it and reluctantly half-believed in it. We prepared our own annihilation in the insane delusion that we were thus saving ourselves. I credit God alone for the fact that that nuclear holocaust was not in fact unleashed, leading to the annihilation of the human race.

I suspect that the insanity that was true of nations then is also true of churchgoers now.

We were recently treated to the heavily publicized spectacle of the United Methodist Church tearing itself apart over homosexuality – an issue which has been deliberately hyper-emphasized and politicized by a small number of highly-paid people, for political/cultural gain. Yet, I believe that very, very few Methodists in the pews actually want their church to tear itself apart. I think they would quickly agree with the apostle Paul that they should live by “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Yet they are being dragged by groups such as the Institute of Religion and Democracy into exactly what the apostle warned against: “…enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy…” by those who fantasize themselves to be the saviors of the church.

Jesus of Nazareth, who is in fact the Savior, is not insane. (For just one example, in case you need one: while he was being unnecessarily and wantonly crucified, he was the only one keeping his head about him, while everyone around him was yelling and going nuts.) His gospel in no way requires any body of his followers to tear themselves away from each other over something so transient and unimportant as sexuality. His body, the church, is literally created and built up through baptism, communion, and preaching (see Augsburg Confession, Article 7) – AND NOT sex.

Jesus himself eschews sex, and two gospels tell us that he was literally born WITHOUT sex[1] – thus doubly reinforcing the principle that his community IS NOT based on sex and all its incidents, such as nationality, gender, race or ethnicity, social class, and sexuality. We Christians forego all those social definers in favor of a community defined by exactly and only the spiritual things that the apostle listed: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” What sane person wouldn’t want to live in just such a community?

Yet once again, the world’s insanity attaches itself like a leech to the body of Christ, creating the delusion that there must be something so horrible about (insert imaginary evil here) that we must now engage in the far-worse evil of destroying the community of Christ. This has been actively happening over the whole course of time I have been a pastor in the church (30+ years), and I am SO sick of it!

For us Christians to stop doing this to ourselves we have to recognize the insanity into which we are being seduced over and over again. The sex-obsessed culture in which we live helps us to delude ourselves into thinking that these fights are VERY VERY IMPORTANT, while they are not. Jesus tells us directly that in the resurrection there will be no sex (Mark 12:25, a fact that some of my male students openly dislike!). That single fact does a lot to de-energize our current fights and obsessions about it. When there are clearly so many much more important matters to deal with – for example, the fact that we rich humans are destroying the planet – then we have to stop obsessively re-energizing this very small one and prioritizing it over all other matters.

The ironic result of these sex fights in the church is that we have blindly fallen into the ditch of making sexuality define us as the church, rather than defining ourselves by the gospel of Christ and the sacraments of Christ. Once Christians are defining themselves by their sexuality rather than by Christ and his gospel, we become a tribe or even a mob rather than the church. (Please see my earlier essay on ecclesio.com, “The Community That’s NOT Constituted by Sex: Our Missing Theology of Celibacy.”) So to be Christian now – or so imagine many weak-minded Christians – means to be baptized, to take communion, to “believe” the Bible (whatever that may mean), AND to be straight. Yes, it’s really that dumb.

Another piece of this insanity is the idolizing of the Bible. I don’t have the space and time here to engage fully with this topic, but suffice it here to remind everyone that the Bible is not actually the foundation of the church. That foundation is Christ alone. “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid [by God]; that foundation is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). Furthermore, it says in John 1:14a “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” Please note that it does not say the Word became paper and ink, nor flesh and paper and ink. The Book does indeed witness to Christ, and that is its function, but it is not itself Christ. So just because some loudmouth preachers found something nasty in the Bible does not mean that we must now all run after this fresh nastiness.

I insist on this theological point because the Bible has long been used and continues to be used ideologically instead of christologically. It has been used not only to justify but to command and defend the enslavement of African people, especially in the United States. The German Christians used the Bible to justify the death system of Nazism. Afrikaner Christians use it to justify the insanity of apartheid. The Bible has been similarly used against women, against native peoples, against LGBTQ people, and now for Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism.

These abuses are only possible because people have been taught to idolize the Bible. They are so easily led astray into hatred and division and away from the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control of the gospel, because anyone can say to them: ‘This-and-such is in the Bible – see? Therefore you must believe it’ (even if it leads to doing evil) and people blindly comply. And so here we the church are, in the ditch, in pieces.

The Bible has many things in it that are contrary to the healing, reconciling, redeeming, and saving gospel of Jesus Christ. The Bible is only used properly when it is used to witness to Christ, and not otherwise.

One final comment: We Christians have by now become so very accustomed to schism that those who seize upon sexuality to divide the church are assumed to be MORE virtuous than those who don’t do this. The schismatics aren’t more virtuous, they are more vicious. They are destroying the church. They ruin the good name of Christ by their weaponizing of sexuality, and are bringing shame upon the whole church. The secular media are immensely helping that process along by going along with the self-description of the schismatics as ‘real Christians.’ So now both many Christians and most non-Christians assume that you have to despise LGBTQ  people in order to be Christian – indeed, they are so far gone into this delusion that they falsely assume this is the signature identifier of genuine Christianity.

As I mentioned in the first essay in this series, the gospel does not allow any of us followers of Jesus to make victims, not even of those who wish to make victims of us. So then, let us follow Jesus, and stop this particular victimizing! His peaceable gospel of forgiveness, mercy, joy in salvation, and love is what we all want from Jesus for ourselves. Jesus gives it to us freely, but he also insists that we must give it out to others while we ourselves receive it from him. How childish, selfish, and greedy we are to grab all these precious blessings for ourselves while then refusing them to others!

Borrowing from the apostle Paul, I must also say “Who will rescue [us] from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:24f). Please pray with me for this truth of the gospel to re-emerge from the tomb of lies we have built around it!

 

Mark Rich is a lecturer in theology and New Testament with ELCA Global Mission in East Africa.

 

[1] Those are Matthew and Luke, of course. The Gospel according to John doesn’t even want to say Jesus was born. It says he “became flesh,” whatever that means. And Mark finds Jesus’ birth not even worth mentioning.