I am sure I am not the only one who read the readings for today and found myself feeling ostracized and filled with dread. It’s a type of ostracization and dread that I have been told to feel time and time again from the institutional Church and various church leaders. All three readings display some sort of moral authority and willingness to judge and condemn, which, put simply, does not make for much of a liberating message – be it in the first reading’s threat of  “ruthlessly being cut off from the people”; the epistles rebuke of being a liar if one were to say “I know God” if they don’t keep each of the commandments perfectly; or the Gospel with Jesus’ suffering for repentance. And yet as I sit further with them, as much as there are parts of scripture that fly in the face of liberation, these readings make me think more about the tradition of faith and the ways in which we have related to the Church, its hierarchy, and authority. 

From Moses to Peter, the Scriptures point to Jesus saying “You must listen to everything this prophet tells you. Anyone who does not listen is to be cut off ruthlessly from the people.”  I often think the American Church ought to listen more to the prophets and, what some would call “The Prophet” of the Christian Scriptures. There is the reality that following the teachings of such prophets often leads to getting cut off from your community – to love one’s neighbor could lead you to ask why the Church at large has supported wars, protected abusers, colonized and crusaded, and continues to support criminalization in exchange for private property…and ultimately could get you cut off from that community that you question. It seems that often members of the institutional Church are more willing to act on these readings advocating condemnation and moral judgment, instead of following Jesus’s call for liberation. These readings are harrowing, and without carefulness can lead people to emphasize and further these oppressive hierarchical forces. 

These readings make clear the way our understanding of words like salvation can lead to misunderstanding the message before us. Theologian and activist Kalie May Hargrove puts it well in saying: 

“Because of its use in theological discussion, we understand salvation to mean the process in which someone gains access to heaven instead of hell. However, the biblical word “σωτηρία” (soteria) denotes a physical rescue, similar to the way we use ‘liberation’” (“Our Language Taught Us to Misinterpret the Bible”).

I am intrigued by the reality that the Church is often, when acting as the moral and scriptural authority, making itself God. Thus, it is the Church’s job and focus to save us from hell, and its own condemnation. Unfortunately, it is often the Church that creates hell for people through ostracization and the resulting loss of relationships. How many families have been torn apart by this moral superiority? How many queer children are torn from their parents? How many people questioning the Church’s relationship to war, unjust laws, history of colonization, and abuse protection are forced to choose between having a relationship with their community or being forcibly excluded from it?

A short exercise with the Psalm could highlight the way this tradition of moral condemnation and the Church as God-Judge is carried out.

So now choose: 

Look on us with kindness, O institutional Church, who, with all its earthly power and wealth, claims to have the gifts of the spirit and the last say in eternal matters?
Or
Look on us with kindness, O God, who spoke of a life and faith that will lead us to oppose anyone who boasts of harm to any neighbor it disagrees with?

Either option will leave one ostracized, so it seems the prophets are right once again. Listen and you will be ruthlessly cut off:

from a community of faithful wanderers, questioners, liberators, and those marginalized from the powers that be if that violent institutional church is chosen…
OR
from a community of the powerful and wealthy, who are increasingly loud and nationalistic in their approach to “being Christians,” but provide a sort of community and comfort and condemn those unaffiliated to the pits of hell.

 (quotes from Renny Golden’s book, The Hour of the Poor, the Hour of Women)

During the Salvadoran Revolution, it’s estimated that more than 8,000 people were disappeared, and more than 75,000 people were killed. While liberating messages could be found from voices inside the Church (like Oscar Romero), many Salvadoran women became bearers of liberation outside of waiting to die to get to heaven. Instead of accepting death as the final word, they bear witness to life even in death and disappearance. Renny Golden writes that the women,

“determine not only the meaning of the loss suffered by the people but they do so as the immediate recipients of such finality. They insist on naming the dead and disappeared. It is a contest the state cannot win. The bearers of life confront the destroyers, refusing to let the dead be anonymous, refusing to allow the mutilated thousands to remain ‘subversives’ and ‘terrorists.’ The mothers carry pictures of their disappeared relatives to attest to a particular violation of the body, a beloved humanity, their child or husband…An often repeated phrase of family or community members of a slain friend is that ‘their death will not be in vain.’ These are not sentimental words but words of an oath. As if they were God or the last revolutionaries of the century, the Salvadorans won’t let the dead die.”

When Jesus died, the disciples thought death had won. When He rose, He ate with them, full flesh and bones and human. When Salvadorans were killed by government forces, those forces tried to convince the mothers that they had won through death. Instead, mothers carried their loved ones’ images physically, bringing them back to life from a death that refused to be final. 

The tension of exploring tradition, scripture, history, and beyond is God, Creator of all things, and can be pointed to as the source of it all as well. A full image is more complicated, but our questions become better with a fuller God. The God who made all rulers, thrones, and powers is the same God who levels haughty towers. We invite you to question, along with apocalyptic folk artist David Benjamin Blower, what God has created and the ways God has responded, especially if it seems contradictory. 

Song – “All Things” by David Benjamin Blower 

Image of the invisible God
Firstborn o’er creation
For by Him all things were made
On earth and in heaven

Jesus Christ, before all things
Who holds all things together
Reconciles all things to God
And all things to each other

All things seen and things unseen
Rulers, thrones or powers
All these things were made through Him
Who levels haughty towers

Our Messiah, Lord and head
Of the gathered body
We the wondering feet and hands
Serving to Thy glory

Here, God’s fullness, pleased to dwell
In Him, Lord and beginning
Making peace now with the blood
Of His crucifixion

Our Messiah, the first new day
First raised among the fallen
That all things may follow Him
Through death to resurrection