Monday, May 26, 2025

Tribal Awareness

 What Tribe Are You A Part Of?

A sermon for Renton UCC based on the passages:

Acts 11:1-18

John 13:31-35

Mark Fredericksen, MDiv, ND

 

Let me borrow, if you will, the control of your imaginations and let me steer us back through time.  We’re going to go way back -- way before the earliest Bible stories were being told around smoky campfires.  Before humans inhabited the Middle East, still living in Africa.  Let’s go to roughly 200,000 years ago.  This is approximately the period of time when Neanderthal humans were evolving into Homo Sapiens –us!  We were living in small family bands.  There were no arrowheads or spears so you were surviving on mainly whatever vegetation was edible, maybe some small game or fowl that could be snared – but fire has just started to be domesticated by some – so maybe your band did not even have that.   As the food sources in your location got consumed, you had no choice but to move on.  If your band ran the territory of another band there could be trouble because food (and water) was a basic matter of survival. The other discovered truth, however, is that more people provided more scavengers and so, the bands negotiated and became tribes. Burying the hatchet so to speak for the good of all.  Those are our roots, our ancestors. And point in fact, approximately 96% of our functional digestive system today is still dependent on the genes we have inherited from them – so our food gets digested the same as theirs did.  And this is a sermon, not a nutrition lecture, but there’s little wonder with all the radical changes in our food chain over just the past 60-70 years that we have trouble digesting the chemicals and processed food.  Also the other prehistoric genetic reality we’re a bit stuck with is we have a high amount of our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems that are what they are because of the eons that humans spent in survival mode – fending off predators, reacting to scarcity, fighting with competing tribes, facing famine and natural disasters. Humanity has been stuck in dog-eat-dog life for a stinking long time. So out of near necessity our human tribalism became hard-wired into our brains. Those with the violent knee-jerk reactions survived and thrived while the less-so struggled. There was then and there is now a cognitive component which can take over and choose other kinds of reactions – but for many they haven’t practiced and learned to do that part.

So let’s move the clock up closer to us – about just 3 or 4000 years ago same competitions going on only the human geography had expanded widely.  There’s cities and empires and organized armies to defend territory.  Food-wise cities could work together for sake of agriculture and animal husbandry. Hunting and gathering took a back seat but the control of territory was still a thing. Wars were still how things got settled. So many of the human beings’ worst traits were still being used for control and the measure of successful cultures. The Bible gets established revealing all the mean rottenness that could play out in human communities. There’s the story of the Flood where God lost patience and wiped the slate clean to start over – but it didn’t really.  The Jewish people have an endless parade of different marauders trek through their lands – Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, Romans, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. 

To survive, naturally, Jews become one more established population group with 12 tribes at one point and they fight off their neighbors (or don’t or can’t).  Then something remarkable happens.   God comes into the picture as a child wrapped in swaddling clothes in a far-flung part of the Roman Empire called Bethlehem. That single event changed world history – or perhaps a better way to say it put a new choice in our laps – That single event drew a line in the sand and supplied a powerful choice to humans to believe in the value of the good side of our nature or continue the warring, violent, resource-snatching tribalism that, until then, was all the world had known.  And that choice is still ours today: the Jesus Tribe or the Ugly Tribe.  The Jesus Tribe – the Christian Way – has not been entirely clear of the messiness of the built-in on-going traumas and reactions of past tribes, cities, nations, and continents.  The Christian Way, as we read here in Acts had two “tribes” facing down each other on who gets to call themselves Christian.  There’s the Jewish Christians (Peter) saying that to be Christian you have to adopt and follow all the Judaic laws and there’s the Gentile Christians (Paul) who aren’t too keen on all the Jewish law.  This splitting of Christianity hasn’t really improved dramatically in 2000 years as we still have – even worse now – denominations where each has its own set of ideas on who can belong, with no shortage of bragging who is best or in the extreme – who is of God and who is of well – you know whatever is worse. Peter’s Vision in Acts caused him to see a new Light for the Way.  He saw a more inclusive way was the path Jesus expected.  Paul had seen this light on the Road to Damascus and was busy welcoming Gentiles all over the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. And so here we are.  What light do we follow?

 

What should be the purpose of the Christian Way today?  Do we want to stay locked in the terrible, learned, defensive violent ways of the past 200,000 years?  Can humans learn nothing besides what the past has imprinted on our brains?  Do we not have a healing remedial solution to knee jerk violence and rage over the slightest slight?  I think we do, but it’s going to take us working together to overcome the panic  & domination reflex – where we see too easily everything as a threat that needs to be eliminated – whether that be not enough money, not enough people, not enough faith?  Threats trigger our fear, which brings out our smallness, our negative reactions.  So where do we turn?

In the Gospel Jesus says, “I’m going where you cannot go, but I give you this: Love one another.” Sure loving one another is easy if we’re all alike – look alike, think alike, hold the same grudges and biases against the others not like us.  And maybe Jesus was pipe dreaming that we could, though I think he really saw a different side to everyone he met – even the ones who crucified him.  So therein is our challenge.  I don’t think the Jesus we know through scripture would leave us with something that was impossible, and we couldn’t possibly do.  I’m also sure that retribution, revenge, grabbing everything you can for yourself is not the Christian Way. There is no faith in Christ at all pursuing those goals.  They cannot sustain your spirit, your soul, any community, or the good of the planet as a whole. Those are the antithesis of everything Christ-like. 

The healing we need for ourselves, our families, our communities and our world are the virtues Christ lived.  Cooperation not competition.  Inclusion not domination. Sharing not possession. Forgiveness not grudge-holding.  And most of all holding tightly to sacred value, worth, and kindness for yourself AND for each one you meet.  I could beat this point into the ground, and Lord knows we all need to be hearing it daily in this toxic soup our politics have plunged us into – but love is the Christian Way for the Jesus Tribe. 

I’ll close with a piece of writing by Hafez.  He was a Persian Poet and Sufi Master born in 1326.  He says,

We are not in pursuit of formalities or fake religious laws.

For it is through the stairway of existence that we have come to God’s door.

We are people who need love, because Love is the soul’s life.

Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.

Through the stairway of existence, You have now come to the Beloved’s Door.”

 

Hafez was a Muslim, but I think he and Jesus would have been pals. Because in the height, and width, and depth and breadth of God, Love is our common denominator and is what keeps us beautifully human with a pinch of the Divine in every one of us.  Always!   

Monday, April 21, 2025

Post Easter Reflection

 The historical truth about authoritarian governments is that subjugation of the masses and cruelty as a cudgel for obedience is the entire point.  The guy at the top is almost always an unusually self-hating narcissist who craves the feeling of being superior to all around him. In the Christian Church this past week, we walked in the steps of one who did not cave in to the narcissistic power structures of the early first century. Rome had it's own problems with subjugated populations from a string of ill Emperors.  At the same time Judaism had it's own unique way of organizing a "power-over religious institution."  Such is the ways of Empire structuring - intimidate all the institutions of a society into worshipping the head and garner their cooperation.

But beginning on Maundy Thursday this past week we were pulled into the acts of remembering to whom and with whom we ultimately and specially belong.  "Maundy" is derived from an Old French word that meant "command or mandate".  Many churches, on this Thursday before Easter, observe foot washing as a liturgical act of remembering Jesus' act of washing the disciples feet and commanding them to "love one another."  It is in loving others (and all of God's created order) that we all flourish.

Good Friday is often observed in visiting the "Stations of the Cross" - the final stopping off places in Jesus' forced travels through the Roman & Jewish gauntlet of legalities to nail him to a cross of state-sponsored shaming.  It was an act to discredit Jesus and threaten would-be followers to tow the line for Rome and "religious authority." 

Holy Saturday is the pause.  The waiting of the world for the final word to drop.  Will death have the final say?

Then the Easter proclamation, first by Mary Magdalene, "the tomb is empty."  Then the appearances of the Risen Jesus start being reported throughout the region.  Death cannot hold this sacred Love that designed creation and set love, acceptance, forgiveness, grace, hope, and peace to nurture and sustain the well-being of all God's creatures. 

That realm, God's realm on earth -- not an authoritarian regime, lets love and kindness loose.  Lets free will and personal sovereignty be the rule of life. Lifts us through blessing and admonitions to thoughtful consideration of purpose with the daily question posed: "Is this the world you want for yourselves, your children, and your children's children?"  If the answer to that question is "Yes!", then remember!  Remember the acts of resistance in grace and purpose that Jesus acted out and taught.  Remember the long string of disciples through the ages who have perpetually harkened back to "The Way of Jesus." Remember and follow him in your daily interactions, your votes, and your voices. 


Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Sovereignty of Spirit

In response to the Saducces question about which of the seven dead brothers the passed-down wife belongs to:

Jesus said to them, "Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.  Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection."
  -Luke 20:34-36

When I heard this passage read at one of the special Holy Week services, I heard for the first time the freedom this passed-down woman received by Jesus' explanation.  She was no longer bound by the definitions and expectations the death(s) of her husbands (and culture) loaded onto her. She was, for the first time in her life, her own person.  Nobody could tell her who she was or what she could do with her life.  She was as free as angels and children!

The Apostle Paul makes reference to the fact that if we believe in Christ we are also raised as new creatons with him.  Our own resurrections are found in our Christ Life that we live out both in our souls and in our community here and now.  We are no longer strictly bound by the rituals, doctrines, legalisms, and cultures of older times. A New Age has dawned and we are granted Sovereignty of Spirit -- true freedom to fully be the creation God breathed into us from the first moment of our spirit-awareness.  We are free to become the full blossom of Love's fingerprint, stamping our unique identity in this time and the time to come.  Angels celebrate all of us who are in the resurrected life. 

So what new expressions of you do you wish to undertake?  How do you go about finding your sovereign identity?  What supports do you need to put into your life so you take hold firmly of your angel-like freedom?