February
2007
The Privilege of Exclusion
This is the text of a sermon by Peter Laarman preached at the First United Methodist Church of Los Angeles on February 11, 2007. The sermon texts were Luke 6:17-26 and Jeremiah 17.5-10.
By now I guess it’s not news to anyone that within American Christianity the tables have been turned in a dramatic way over the course of five decades. I can sketch these changes very simply. In the middle of the last century—fifty years ago, more or less—the Mainline Protestant denominations dominated the religious landscape. The gleaming Interchurch Center in New York City—475 Riverside Drive, commonly known as the “God Box”—had just been built with money from the Rockefellers. That building functioned as a kind of a Protestant Vatican. The National Council of Churches of Christ, headquartered there, spoke for the major Protestant bodies with considerable authority, as did state and local ecumenical councils, which were then strong and well-funded.
All of that is now gone, almost vanished. A dynamic and determined United Methodist—Bob Edgar, a former Congressman from Pennsylvania and a former president of Claremont School of Theology—did manage to save the National Council from bankruptcy while leading the Council over the past eight years, but even Bob could not give back to Mainline Protestantism its former glory. No one could do that.
What happened? Well, the country changed and the culture changed, but Mainline Protestants did not adapt very well. They did not take seriously the possibility that Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals would stage a spectacular comeback, in part by channeling white resentment of the Civil Rights Movement, fomenting anxiety over abortion, and exploiting what many working people viewed as an excessively permissive society in the Sixties and Seventies.
Perhaps more significantly, Mainline Protestants neglected their evangelism, forgot how to tell their own story with conviction and passion. I think they took it for granted that everyone would know and appreciate the commitment of Mainline churches to freedom of conscience and would know and appreciate the huge contributions made by liberal Protestantism to the support of higher education, to human and civil rights, to international peacemaking and disarmament, and so forth. But with no one to tell this story convincingly, all of these contributions and accomplishments functioned as a kind of cultural wallpaper. And you know that wallpaper—no matter how beautifully designed and attractive—almost never gets noticed except by wallpaper connoisseurs. Alas, there weren’t many wallpaper connoisseurs in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. The people with real passion—the people who taking the stage and telling their story—were the civil rights marchers and the student activists and later the women’s rights and gay rights activists. And joining them on stage, of course, were the antagonists of all these movements: the self-appointed defenders of traditional values, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson and James Kennedy and many others who, by the end of the 1980s, had without question become the leading public voices of American Protestant Christianity—much to the horror of the displaced Mainline leaders. To many, it seemed that this turnabout had taken us yet again to one of those nightmare moments in history in which “the best lack all conviction, [while] the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”
My point is not to dwell on the depressing story of how the tables got turned. I want to see instead whether we might find it possible to view the displacement of liberal Protestantism—the near-eclipse of progressive Christianity within U.S. culture—as a kind of blessing in disguise: to see it as a gift to those of us who remain in the progressive camp, bloody but still unbowed.
I want to preach to you the privilege of exclusion.
In this culture, of course, we don’t think of exclusion as a good thing. We don’t like it when we are not included in the charmed circle of society’s winners. We aren’t happy when we don’t get called by newspaper reporters or by television new producers to share our views on the state of the world. I’m certainly not happy that Oprah doesn’t call! We don’t like it when we’re not on the guest list for admission to a swank new club or restaurant. We don’t like it when our kids can’t get into elite universities. We want to be insiders; it’s a natural human inclination.
But here is the catch. A vital Christian faith cannot stay vital for long when it operates from a position of privilege. Instead, we who claim to follow Jesus are at our best when we are outside of the charmed circle, just as Jesus himself was very much outside the winner’s circle in his own society. Jesus wants us to associate ourselves with the outcasts, the rejected ones. He even says that we will meet him there—that we will meet the living Christ and receive the living Christ at the margins of society, where there is hurt and suffering and social exclusion. That’s where we will find our real communion, that’s where our hope and energy will be renewed, and that’s were we can start to build alternative structures to the corrupted structures and values of the domination system.
I want us to focus on the privilege of exclusion, because that is also where the scriptures appointed for this Sunday invite our reflections to go.
Most of us know the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew much better than we know Luke’s rendering of the same sermon, or collection of sayings, which Luke situates instead on a level place—on a plain—instead of on a mount or hillside. That subtle difference right away suggests that Jesus wants to be close to the excluded: on the same ground as the brokenhearted and wounded and not positioned above them as in Matthew.
Also, Luke’s version is not spiritualized like Matthew’s. There’s no “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” No, Luke’s Jesus is talking unmistakably about people and to people who just don’t have enough money—“Blessed are you who are poor,” he says—and he is talking unmistakably about a revolution, a coming reign of God in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
We know a revolution is envisioned, because this sermon includes curses as well as blessings, with a corresponding curse for each blessing. So, “blessed are you who are poor…but woe to you are rich”; “blessed are you who are hungry now…[but] woe to you who are full now”; and “blessed are you who weep now…[but] woe to you who are laughing now.” This is a reversal in social relations that Jesus is preaching, and it will mark the inbreaking of God’s reign when it finally starts to happen on a major scale.
Now let me be absolutely clear in saying to you that this reversal is what we today are supposed to be working for as well. This reversal, this revolution, is what we are supposed to be praying for when we pray to God each day, “Your will be done on earth, even as it is in heaven.” Yes, St. Francis was right, and we are supposed to become instruments of God’s peace. But St. Francis is clear—and we should be equally clear—that God’s peace is inseparable from God’s justice, and that if we are not about justice we have little of the living Christ in our hearts.
You may know that in Mexico there’s an old saying that goes, “so far from God, so close to the United States.” Well, I like to turn that around and say, of this country, “so close to Mexico, so far from God.”
I was in Mexico recently, at a conference of religious leaders in Cuernavaca. And I was struck as I always am by the graciousness and dignity of the Mexican people. Also by the fact that so many ordinary Mexicans have not given up on the dream of a just society. They struggle at great personal risk against a government that is based on privilege and violence and exploitation.
What I lament about our country is that so few here—and especially so few Christians here—seem capable of perceiving the profoundly anti-Christian and (I would even say) profoundly satanic way in which American society is now organized.
I wonder if anyone here knows what a “grossup” is? The “grossup” is a Wall Street term for a now-common practice through which, in addition to hauling away enormous golden parachutes when they leave a CEO position—bonanzas that often include homes, the continued use of corporate jets, memberships in private clubs, etc.—these corporate looters also get the company they worked for to pay any taxes due on the cash portion of their takeaway money. That is why it’s called a grossup: if you are one of these masters of the universe—like that Robert Nardelli, who screwed up Home Depot but still walked away with over $200 million—you get to keep the gross amount of the booty you take out on leaving the corner office.
How about that? These are the same executives, of course, who often get the big bonuses and stock options for exceptional “performance” when that performance consists mainly of cutting the pay and benefits of the ordinary workers, or of outsourcing the work and doing away with the ordinary workers altogether.
Now I’m not naïve. I realize that corporate executives in the U.S. have always been paid a lot more than the workers at the bottom. But I can remember when those workers at the bottom would at least get some of the benefit of rising productivity in their pay envelopes. Not any more. Labor productivity in the United States rose 18 percent between 2000 and 2006, but workers hardly got any benefit from it: their inflation-adjusted weekly wages rose by just 1 percent during this same period. That’s a raise of $3.20 per week for the average worker. This why what is left of the working middle class is only able to hang on by maxing out those credit cards and by working outrageously long hours.
And you don’t even want to get me started on the subject of taxes. Our problem today is not just that the rich and powerful are looting corporations through these excessive compensation packages and other scams. Our problem is also the terrible injustice of a tax code that causes the rest of us taxpayers to subsidize their lofty lifestyles. That’s because if you are rich most of your income will come from capital gains and dividends that are taxed at a much lower rate than wage income. And it’s because the portion of personal taxes that supports Social Security and Medicare is conveniently—conveniently for the rich, that is—capped at $97,500 per year; income above that amount is not subject to this tax. But of course it’s also because despite a war that is costing $3 billion each week, our current President has seen fit to sharply cut the taxes that rich people should be paying. Assuming that they stay in effect, fully half of the dollar value of the successive Bush tax cuts will end up going to very rich: to households in the top 1 percent with average annual incomes of $1.25 million. Their effective tax rate already plunged 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Measured in dollars that is not chump change: it works out to an extra $60,000 per rich household per year. It’s as though Bush gave all his rich friends an extra BMW to cruise around in during each of his first four years in the White House.
I said that the way our society is organized, with its increasing levels of savage inequality, is anti-Christian. I know there are some so-called Christians who go around proclaiming that God wants them to be rich, but I challenge them to find any warrant for their so-called Prosperity Gospel in the Bible. They certainly won’t find it in the words and actions of Jesus Christ. “Woe to you who are rich,” said Jesus, “for you have received your consolation.” No, the Jesus whose life, death, and resurrection we recall every Sunday was the servant of the poorest and the avowed enemy of their rich exploiters. Yes, it is true that he had compassion for the rich young ruler, but he had absolutely no sympathy for the fact that this otherwise virtuous young leader would not part with his money and thereby enter the kingdom of heaven—the reign of God where the good things of life are shared and where all have enough.
We cannot serve God and wealth. It is that simple. So who we who would be faithful to God in this place and time must necessarily be outsiders. There is no other choice in a god-forsaken America that is increasingly dominated by the wealthiest. The corporations and the wealthy now buy and sell our politicians like so many playthings; they own the Congress lock, stock, and barrel—and they make no apology for it. A Democratic Congress can’t even raise the minimum wage buy a paltry few cents an hour without also handing business a new tax cut. We can’t get decent national health care because the pharmaceutical companies and the for-profit health care providers and the makers of medical equipment will absolutely not allow their profits to be threatened—and never mind how many children are sick or how many workers live in fear of getting sick and losing all their savings or even losing their house in order to pay for treatment.
Now trust me, if you start talking the way I have been talking you are going to be ridiculed and dismissed. You are going to be accused of waging class warfare, never mind that it’s really the rich who have been waging class warfare against the rest of us for 30 years now. You are going to be called all kinds of names. You might even find yourself unwelcome in circles that formerly welcomed you. Even your old friends might cut you off. I know that some of mine have.
But being pushed outside of the circle of respectability shouldn’t come as some kind of surprise for a serious Christian. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on my account. Rejoice on that day, and jump for joy, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.”
Groucho Marx used to say that he did not want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. That should be our attitude as Christians toward the American domination system. Even if the rich and powerful should decide to invite us to join them in the corridors of power—which they sometimes do for the sake of adding a touch of spirituality to the proceedings—we should refuse to enter. We should stay on the outside where the ordinary people are and where there is grace and truth and a passion for something better. That’s where Jesus is, and that’s where Jesus needs us to be.
And do you know what? We won’t be lonely as outsiders. We will be blessed and rewarded in a different way.
Jeremiah gets that part. In words the echo the first psalm, the prophet says that those who put their trust in the Lord, those whose trust is the Lord, will be like trees planted by streams of water. They shall not fear when the heat comes up, because their leaves will stay evergreen thanks to deep and well-watered roots. They won’t be anxious when the time of drought comes; they will never cease to bear fruit.
So let us accept that the tables have indeed turned for liberal Christianity. Let us accept that we have become an endangered species in a sense—a still shrinking minority of voices speaking truth within a corrupted culture. Should we worry and fret that we have become relatively powerless in the conventional sense?
Our job is not to try to win approval or be popular or try to regain our lost social power. That would be nice, and someday that might happen. But our only real job is to remain faithful and to rejoice always that the reign of God is already present though not yet fully realized in our midst.
May that fullness of God’s reign come quickly. Amen.