Easter Sunday sermon 2012 at St. Timothy Lutheran Church in Copper Cliff, Ontario, Canada.

From Harmless Housewife to Teen Sex Slave

Images of the Female in a Culture of Sex and Violence

 
What happened to Women’s Lib in a culture where Teen Dating Violence is the fastest growing area of violence against women? Contemporary culture is celebrating abuse of power and violence against women again! The line between domestic violence, pornography and slavery in the sex industry get’s blurrier every day.Speak out against violence towards women and a culture which promotes it as the widow speaks out against injustice in Luke 18:1-8.

It is time to move for the Peccatori.  We have been called by the good people of St. Matthew and St. Timothy Lutheran Churches (ELCIC) in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada to be their pastors. While we will pack our bags and leave the California sun and finally get some hard earned snow, we won’t be able to produce  new WEBSINs.

But we will be back with more sinful podcasts shortly before Christmas.

Until then, may God bless you and keep you. And do not forget, right wing Evangelicals may hate you, but God does not. Christ will be with you until the end of time.

1/4/2012 – Well, it’s like it always is. We’re too late, Christmas was crazy, New Year was exhausting, but we’ll be back with new stuff soon. Be blessed! The Peccators!

Sermon on Matthew 22.1-14

Preached at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in San Francisco on 10/09/2011.

Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.
Romans 2:1 (NRSV)

The Parable of the Wedding Banquet

1 Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: 2 "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ 5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. 9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ 10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
11 "But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. 13 Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 14 For many are called, but few are chosen."

Matt 22:1-14 (NRSV)

The Pitfalls of Christian Mission.

Every winter, it is the same ritual. Anointed with sunscreen, mostly Americans and Japanese descend on the beach of Waikiki to find out how Sardines feel when they are crammed in a can. Hawaii is the prime location to enjoy the blessings of mass tourism. When they make up for 52 weeks of toil and snares, vacationers usually do not give the behind of a rodent how this Polynesian island came to be the 50^st state.

featuring Jamaica Osorio, Brave New Voices, HBO 2009

For those who want more than sunburn and efficiently calculated hotel luaus, Sarah Vowell has written “Unfamiliar Fishes” (Riverhead, 2011), a highly accessible history of Hawaii. With pointed prose, she takes a very sobering look on how the land of the free ended the freedom of Hawaii. Her book is recommended not just for the history buffs, but especially for those who try to spread the word of Christ.

As a topic for religious discourse, Hawaii is as exotic as its location. But unrightfully so. It is almost a model case for the pitfalls of Christian mission in the nineteenth century. In 1820, American missionaries bring the message of love. It must have been a tough love, because nauseated contempt for the natives drips from the pages of their diaries. Half a century later, most Hawaiians are dead and their islands are the private property of the missionaries’ grandsons. Hawaii, that never was a true Garden of Eden, aside from the weather, had turned into a thoroughly segregated paradise for rich racists.

Lorrin Andrews Thurston (July 31, 1858 – May 11, 1931) was a lawyer, politician, and businessman born and raised in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. The grandson of two of the first Christian missionaries to Hawaiʻi, Thurston played a prominent role in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom that replaced Queen Liliʻuokalani with the Republic of Hawaii, dominated by American interests.- wikipedia

Vowell’s book may serve as an underpinning to revisit a painful chapter of church history. The church is called to spread the gospel. The mission to Hawaii also felt called to bring “civilization”. Accordingly, the missionaries were primarily guided by their cultural biases and not by the word of Christ. Subordinating the gospel to culture is a very contemporary problem, e.g. acceptance – or not – of LGBT people in mainstream Protestant churches. Exploring the past will illuminate the present and help the church to avoid the mistakes of the past. She should be busy enough making new mistakes.

The intentions were pure when missionaries were dispatched by the American Board for Commissioners of Foreign Mission, the first missionary society in the US. Heathens had to be rescued from the darkness of unbelief. The board had its roots in the “Second Great Awakening”. Their piety combined an experiential conversion event with a profound appreciation of the scriptures. Unfortunately, their gospel was inseparably tied to the New England variant of Western culture. In their perception, the Calvinist Protestant was the bearer of God’s light to a world that was darkened by unbelief and the Catholics.

God gave New England the gift of civilization. Much of the rest of the world had yet to receive this gift. So the missionaries felt compelled to bring the double blessings of gospel and civilization. In short, true salvation was only found in the Heathen’s discovery of his inner New Englander.

Hiram Bingham, formally Hiram Bingham I (1789–1869), was leader of the first group of Protestant missionaries to introduce Christianity to the Hawaiian islands. wikipedia

The catch is that the usual New England Calvinist is white, and most heathens are not. They will not change color even through the profoundest religious conversion experience. The closed tie between culture and gospel leaves the even most successful missionary with somewhat flawed results. Hawaii never became New England.

It rather became the American South on steroids. While Christians in the American North were leading the charge against slavery and racial inequality, they led Hawaii in exactly the opposite direction, down the bitter road to Apartheid.

An archipelago situated in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean is an environment with limited resources. For centuries, an intricate Kapu system, a system of religious prohibitions and commands, had guaranteed the hierarchies of society, and the balance of the ecosystem. A society had emerged that had many superficial similarities with the European feudal system. Juri Mykkanen in his book “Inventing Politics” (University of Hawaii Press, 2003) describes the system as a mutual exchange of rank for life. The islands were ruled by chiefs. Through their ancestry, the chiefs were connected to the divine source of life at the beginning of the world. In exchange for their rank, they were obligated to guarantee the life of the community by conducting rituals that controlled the Gods and through the setting of Kapus that guided the behavior of the people.

When the brig Thaddeus delivered the first company of missionaries to Hawaii in 1820, they encountered a society in change. King Kamehameha I recently had united the archipelago with an iron fist and Western weapons. Shortly after his death in 1819, the highly stratified society and the religious system of traditional Hawaii collapsed. Unified Hawaii had entered a historical phase where the old ways were abolished, and new ways had not yet been found. The missionaries took this transition time as a housewarming gift of God himself. They had planned to burn the idols, and now they were delighted that the “savages” had done so themselves.

The missionaries were also emissaries of a society in transformation. The industrial revolution of the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century saw the change of traditional modes of production and commerce. A steady influx of immigrants to the United States created an increasing diversification of the religious landscape. Prospering trade routes connected the major ports of the Americas and Europe with the riches of Asia and Africa. The exchange of goods and ideas did not spare the rural backwaters that were the origins of the American Board’s missionaries and its contributing congregations.

These communities lived in stark contrast to the big ports on the Eastern seaboard. There the spirit of Enlightenment and free commercial enterprise had gradually replaced the foundations of traditional Christian values rooted in community, family and appropriate behavior. The new society served the self rather than the Lord.

The diversification of New England’s social structures and the emerging secularism with its focus on rational thought instead on biblical revelation was no lesser challenge to Calvinists than the abandonment of the Kapu system was for traditional Hawaiians. Boston’s commercial liberalism shamelessly encouraged a secular way of life which challenged the core of orthodox Calvinist identity. It bluntly denied the universal validity of their theological claims.

The so challenged community needed a tangible sign of divine grace. They needed to be assured that their idea of salvation remained not just valid, but that their way of life was indeed the only proper way to live a godly life.

This sign was found in the mission to Hawaii and similar enterprises around the globe. If the New England way of godly life can be made relevant to foreign people, it will also remain relevant at home.

Accordingly, we find the early missionaries frowning upon the Hawaiian diet, sticking to salt pork, and dreaming about New England’s dairy products. In the tropic climate, they wore woolen clothes. They imported building materials from New England because civilized people build brick houses. They ignored or dismissed all experiences that enabled the Hawaiians to exist in their limited resource islands.

Seen from a contemporary perspective, we have to admit that the mission’s primary focus was cultural. The transformation of Hawaiians into discolored New Englanders assured the folks back home that they were still God’s chosen people. Their divine favor was made evident when even the Hawaiian “savages” imitated their righteous lifestyle. This makes the ABCFM’s mission to Hawaii a deeply selfish enterprise, and this inherent selfishness makes the ABCFM’s mission a sin.

The missionaries were not the only force that contributed to the demise of Hawaiian self-government. The royal line had no shortage of inept leaders. There was also the missionaries’ old foe from way back home, the forces of secular commercial liberalism embodied by whalers, sailors, businessmen, speculators and foreign imperialists. In the 19^th century, the world was up for grabs and greedy hands reached for the fertile soil of Hawaii. Where money is to be made, people do not matter, especially not brown ones. The missionaries fought a losing battle against foreign business interests until their children succumbed to the lure of gold and joined the ranks of those who came to Hawaii to make a profit.

The people of Hawaii paid the price. Like indigenous populations all over the globe, they were decimated by disease, and lost their land rights. They became trespassers on the soil they once called home. Asian labor was imported to increase the profits of a small, white and ferociously racist elite. What the tourist brochures today call a tropical paradise with one of the most multiracial populations in the US, was in the 19^th century a segregated hell. The notable exceptions were the frequent marriages between the members of the royal Hawaiian family and the primarily American money elite. For the rest of Hawaii the result of the encounter with the God of love was white supremacy.

Christians have to bear the historical burden of missionary exploits like the one to Hawaii and around the globe. This legacy might account in part for the declining membership in mainstream Protestant churches. Who in his right liberal mind wants to be associated with the missionaries of the ABCFM? Conservative and fundamental Christians seem to have slightly fewer reservations.

Progressive American Christians cannot avoid this legacy, which is still a source of continued pain in Hawaii. Independence activists insist that they are not Americans. They want their islands back, and they want the US to leave. The issues that arise out of the demands for independence are complex. The Hawaiian kingdom is longer out of existence than it ever was in existence. The demographic makeup of the islands has changed entirely, and so has land ownership. Accordingly, the sensibilities among those who call for Hawaiian independence can be extremely delicate. In many cases, they are anti-American and anti-white. They put their monarchy on a pedestal that it may not deserve, but even the most illustrious king is infinitely preferable to the cold-hearted racism that followed.

The Hawaiian people deserve justice. To acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy, President Bill Clinton on behalf of the United States offered an apology to Native Hawaiians. Since the apology, a couple of legislative initiatives concerning the status of Hawaiians have roamed the corridors of Capitol Hill. None has found widespread consent among the activists; most have instead sparked vehement protests.

A mere apology means little if the situation on the ground does not change. If you see a guy in Honolulu sweeping the floor, there is a good chance, he is Hawaiian. To this very day, even in a society as diverse as the Aloha state, people of Hawaiian ancestry face the burdens of institutionalized racism. They experience disadvantages in education, on the job market, around health issues, in housing, food security, and life expectancy, just to mention a few.

Christians do not necessarily have to agree with the political demands of the Hawaiian activists, but they have to stop ignoring them. Justice entitles the Hawaiians to be heard when they tell the story of their lost islands. There can be no more denying or justifying the past because Christians fear they might look bad. This would be full-fledged hypocrisy; and that is a considerable obstacle to church growth and social relevance of religious institutions.

North Americans are creatures of their culture, and they cannot and should not deny who they are. As Americans, as New Englanders, and as missionaries of Christ they are able and called to love and cherish the diversity of people and cultures that God has made. This is not the much-feared liberal relativism, but the insight that we are not chosen from among the nations to be entitled, but that we are chosen to serve. Missionaries are called to show compassion, to assure God’s grace, and extend a helping hand to those in need. They are not called to carve notches in their baptismal fonts to mark the number of heathens they saved. It is a sinful illusion to think missionaries could save anybody. God alone saves through Christ. All missionaries can do is embody God’s love for God’s creatures.

It is also an illusion to believe that we need to take Christ anywhere. Wherever we go on God’s earth, Christ is already there. The Hawaiian Spirit of Aloha is the inherent state of being of a non-Christian society. It was and still is a way of life. It is a love for God and neighbor most Christians only talk about. If we go to Hawaii to bring Christ and instead get some Aloha, the trip would have been worthwhile. Aloha is Christ applied to life. Mission is a transformational experience, and it is by no means certain who will be called to do the changing.

Mission should be an encounter of the human with the human to discover that all people are loved by God. God loves us and God loves all the others, and that is precisely what makes God very different from us. – And the world needs to hear that.

Reflections by Guest Peccatrix Martha Santrizos.

God of Peace,
You felt our pain on 9-11
Heard our cries from ocean to ocean
Saw destruction burned into our memories

Unquiet peace ruled in a state of false calm
     You heard the prayers of many
     The innermost wounds did not depart
Whose peace ruled that day and beyond?
     Death turned to violence and revenge
     Your will be done did not prevail
     Our state of the art society was shocked

Prayers rose up in this nation and around the world
     For understanding, for peace, and for healing
You poured compassion into our open wounds
     You stretched out your arms
          To comfort all your peoples
          To bring healing and reconciliation
          To a land pained and grieving
     You gave your spirit of hope and heart of forgiveness
          To those who felt life turned upside down
          To break down fears and reckless lies
          To begin the journey toward wholeness
     You walked beside us,
          Always extending your lens of perfect love

Ten years have passed since 9-11…
     An entire nation affected by a man-made disaster
     Many in the nation were angry
     Some pursued revenge while some sought peace
Has change come by your will being done on earth?
     How far have we come from that day?
     What have we learned?
Towering infernos and crumbling towers
     Imprinted in our brains forever

Let us not grow weary
     from offering up prayers daily
          For who you are
          The great I AM
How much more will you respond, O God
     if we humbly pray
     “God Bless America” everyday
          Not because of who we are,
          But because we trust in who you are. AMEN.

The dedication of the memorial in honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington D.C. has been postponed; however, the monument is already erected, in sight of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Is this where Martin Luther King belongs?

For Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake, and Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith Sr., teachers at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) is most renowned for his contributions to the civil rights movement, and rightfully so. However, the civil rights movement is oftentimes reduced to a solely political movement. The deep spiritual, religious motivation behind it is neglected; the public sphere has forgotten about it. To me, the spirituality and theology King has formed and molded is the most important thing. It is the foundation of the political fight; the foundation of non-violence; the foundation of direct action; the foundation for the courage and love which weaves through all of the early civil rights movement. Faith, faith in Jesus Christ, gave the movement the power and strength to fight against injustice and inequality.

There is a direct line leading from the spirituality and theology which the African-American community has developed in the times of slavery to the spirituality and theology which sustained the civil rights movement around King. I encountered this African American Christian thought most profoundly in a class about Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman (1899-1981), a theologian who was well known to King Senior and Junior. In Jesus and the Disinherited, 1949, Thurman cites his maternal grandmother, who told him about the core message of her minister: “You – you are not niggers. You-you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” Jesus provides an alternative identity to believers, our true identity. We do not depend on how our fellow human beings define us. Ultimately, we are defined by God, and God’s loving relationship to us. This is what we can build our identity on. This is where we get our strength, our security and our pride.

This American theology, although derived out of the very particular experience of slavery, is inclusive in its heart. Its core message is that ALL people are God’s children, independent of their status and situation here on earth. Thurman, as well as King, both make a point of including people of ALL races, also white people, even white supremacists, into their Christian love. God’s kingdom is open to ALL, without exceptions, without conditions.

This inclusivity is very different from another line of American theological thought which has its beginnings in the experience of the early Puritan settlers from Northern Europe. Right from the beginning, the Puritan emigrants defined themselves AGAINST others. Outnumbered and out powered by the religious and political forces in their former home countries, the American Puritans sought to prove to themselves and to the world that they were RIGHT in defending their persecuted religion. John Winthrop (1588-1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, coined these famous words: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” An obvious way to prove the beliefs of the American Puritans to be right is to prove other belief systems to be wrong. If Puritanism is right, then Catholicism, the “darkness of popery”, is wrong. If Puritanism is right, then Native American religions, which countless American missionaries describe as to be of the devil, are wrong. Seeds of assumed superiority are easily planted in this black-and white worldview. There is a direct line of thought leading from the exclusivity of early American Puritanism to theologies of racist supremacy, and concepts of social Darwinism. The important underlying idea is that God and/or nature have designed the world to consist of elect or superior and damned or inferior beings. Godly election/natural superiority reveals itself in this-worldly success, while Godly damnation/natural inferiority reveals itself in this-worldly failure. That is why people who follow this line of thought can easily refuse to help those in need. If God shows God’s favor by providing the elect with this-worldly achievements, then poverty and failure are clear signs that God has turned God’s back on you.

Thurman finds it hard to understand that the Christian religion, so clearly born out of a situation of persecution and injustice, has this tendency to transform into the religion of the “strong against the weak.” Jesus, as a Jew under Roman occupation, belonged to an oppressed ethnicity; and he was poor. The majority of the world population of all times is and has been poor. Therefore, poverty makes Jesus truly a “Son of Man”. Jesus is one of us. Jesus takes the human form with all consequences and for a reason; Jesus humanizes people. Disciples of Jesus Christ must abandon what Thurman names the “three hounds of hell” – fear, hypocrisy and hatred. These cannot be allowed to determine our ways of life, because they produce inhumanity and exclusion. Spirituality in Jesus Christ inevitably leads to humanity, hospitality and inclusivity.

It is the great achievement of King to remind all of us that the spiritual foundation of the American dream as expressed in the Declaration of Independence (1776) is based on this longstanding American tradition of equality and inclusivity; and NOT on ideas of inequality and exclusion born out of the “three hounds of hell” fear, hypocrisy, and hatred. In his commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, 1961, titled The American Dream, King writes

Political views always are products of worldviews. In our society these worldviews more often than not are strongly influenced by our Judeo-Christian tradition. And they also form and reform what we perceive this tradition to be. Do we want our spirituality and politics to reflect a religion of “the strong against the weak”? Do we want our ideas of freedom to be exclusive to many? Our ideas of economics to be driven by fear, hatred and greed? King’s vision of America is larger than that. He sees us as a nation which strives for justice and equality in courage and love. His political convictions are based on his Christian faith which tells him that, as children of God, we all are of equal worth.

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When Jesus said in Matthew 5:39, “ If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”, he really meant, “you talk funny, – I put bullet in your head!”  (Careful, if you listen to this podcast, you expose yourself to satire.)

God hates gun control, and that’s why God loves the National Rifle Association, because the NRA also hates gun control. In God’s kingdom everyone is armed to the teeth.

Jesus is all about peace. If one of your neighbor disturbs the peace, shoot the bastard and than restore the peace. – Not just for the moment, but you can be a provider of eternal peace. That is why Jesus loves people with guns. They are peacemakers.

Zeus versus Trinity – take your pick!

Christian faith calls for equal standing of all people before God. This is easier said than done, even in a system of democracy! If you believe in a system of hierarchy, you might rather be attracted to Zeus. The Trinity is the principle of equality in community anchored in God self.

The history of Western Christianity cannot be understood without looking at the major influence ancient Roman religiosity.had on the development of the church.

Among the many things, gentlemen of the pontifical college, that our ancestors created and established under divine inspiration, nothing is more renowned than their decision to entrust the worship of the gods and the highest interests of the state to the same men. Marcus Tullius Cicero

The faith in the God of Abraham, Jacob and Moses emerged  in the Ancient Near East. It was passed down through the history of the people of Israel until the emergence of Christianity in the first century CE. Then the faith in God left the ethnic and regional confines of its origins and spread around the globe.

A decisive step in this process was the inclusion non-Jewish people into the community of faith. This happened all around the Mediterranean, but most prominently, or with the most consequences for Western Christianity in Rome.

Ancient Rome is very much alive in our contemporary theological interpretation of reality. The idea that God blesses the righteous with success and material wealth is not part of the Jewish tradition, but is the core principle of Roman paganism.