Scripture: John 15:9-17
This is Memorial Day weekend, and we will take time to acknowledge that occasion and whatever feelings may accompany it, during prayer time today. I want to begin the sermon though by memorializing someone who was not a soldier. On April 27 of this year, four weeks ago, a theologian died. Her name was Dorothee Soelle. (People who speak German better than I do will say her name better than I do.) I did not know her. I know Lee Walters did, because she taught for part of each year at Union Seminary during the time Lee was there.
I asked Lee about her yesterday and was relieved to find that she had been a warm person and someone you would remember fondly. Sometimes you admire a person’s writings and that person turns out to be an unlikable sort of person. I know Dorothee Soelle only through her writings. I never even heard her speak in person. I didn’t know, until Lee reassured me, whether she was a warm or a kind person, or whether she was a good teacher or an engaging personality. I do know that at various earlier times in my life she was an important person for me because she provided theological words that I could relate to, when many other theological words seemed foreign to me.
I meant to say something about Dorothee Soelle in the sermon last week. It turned out that I didn’t have time to offer her my small personal tribute last week, and so I wanted to do that this week. She’s still on my mind. And I think she’s relevant to what I want to say this week as well as what I was wanting to say last week.
I first encountered Dorothee Soelle at a time in my ministry when, as I recall, I was feeling dissatisfied and unsettled about the language I was using in church every week. It was seeming to me, well, several things. It was seeming to me rather conventional. It was seeming to me too tame and comfortable. And it was seeming to me not to be authentic for me. None of this was surprising actually. Not having grown up in a Christian church, and having concluded I was a Christian and feeling called to the ministry without a whole lot of church experience, I spent the first five to ten years in the ministry trying to learn to speak the language of the church, much the way an immigrant might try to pick up the language and customs of a new country. I was well schooled in matters of religion, but when I moved from the world of the university into the world of the church, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I had a pretty decent vocabulary, because I had taken a lot of courses in the language of the church; I had just never lived there. I knew a lot of the right words. But they didn’t just roll off my lips with the ease and assurance that I thought they probably should or that I thought other people probably thought they should. Whether it was in gatherings of colleagues or just among the people of the congregation I was serving, I had this sense that when I opened my mouth, people would realize that I was a foreigner, that I didn’t quite belong and wasn’t really one of them. I was doing my best to speak the Christian church language, but I felt like I was speaking with a heavy accent that revealed that I came from a land of unbelief and reservation about church and that I would somehow have to prove that I really belonged in this church land that I had immigrated to. And although my sense of being an outsider may have been more a result of my own insecurities than other people’s lack of acceptance, it was, in any case, not a good feeling, and I spent my early years in the ministry trying to lose my accent.
It was an understandable thing to want to do, I think—to want to move easily and be accepted among colleagues and parishioners, to want to feel like you belong in this place where you have landed and are not lost in the land where God has led you. It was an understandable thing to want to fit in, but it was not a good thing, and it wasn’t working too well, and I had begun to realize all that when I first encountered Dorothee Soelle. She herself, thank God, spoke Christianity with a heavy accent, and I don’t mean German. She helped me realize it was o.k. to speak the Christian language with a heavy accent. She helped me feel not so lonely in the church. She was among those who helped to put me on the road to finding my own voice within the church.
One of the reasons I thought of Dorothee Soelle in connection with last week’s sermon is that she spoke of the need for the church to be a place of resistance to the dominant culture, the need not to accommodate or adjust to the culture of which we are a part, the need to speak a clear no to the society around us. “The real exile of Christians in the first world,” she once wrote, “is that we have learned to endure it. We do not consider our living in the affluent societies as being in captivity…We have learned to endure the exile so well that we no longer see ourselves as exiled people—as strangers in a strange land…and to learn to endure the exile is to suppress even our thirst for justice.”
Those of you who were here last week and remember at least the tone of what I was saying can see maybe how I might have thought of including such a statement then. Not just adapting or adjusting, not just a calm acceptance or an easy accommodation to things as they are is called for from Christians, but learning to say no and maintaining a core of anger that gives an edge and an urgency to our faith. Many years ago Dorothee Soelle began to articulate those things for me, and reminded me that I had not come to Christianity or to the Christian church in order to fit in, either to the church or the culture that most Christian churches lived in easy relationship with. I had sought the church out because I wanted to find a place to stand that would be a place of resistance. I had hoped the church could be such a place.
But another thing Dorothee Soelle helped me with back when was the idea that part of what we in the church needed to say no to was the church, including particularly the theology of the church, specifically the language in the theology of the church that implied that God is authoritarian in nature. There’s a lot of that language in the church. God is King, lord, ruler of the universe, almighty, victorious, in control. God commands the stars and planets, orders the times and seasons, gives and takes life, speaks and the universe comes into being. God said…and there was. And yet none of that was entirely comfortable for me. I found myself among sincere faithful people who would say something like, “We just have to remember that God’s in charge,” and I would feel like this isn’t the language I speak about God. Not so much that I would want to debate whether the statement was “true” or not in some abstract sense, but just that that’s not the way I want to talk about God, not the words I want to use, not any words I would use or could use. That’s what I mean about having felt like I was speaking Christian with an accent all the time. If I were to refer to God as almighty, I had this sense that people would hear the hesitation in my voice, the catch in the throat, the desire to stop and explain myself. I couldn’t say it quite right.
Dorothee Soelle was one of those people who helped me to know that the catch in the throat is o.k. In fact she urged me, and other Christians, to work at saying no to that authoritarian kind of theology, not because it was wrong—in the way of dealing with things where someone has to be right and someone wrong—but because it didn’t speak of the God who neither commanded nor allowed the world’s suffering but who is present in the pain of the world, didn’t speak of the God who not so much commanded the worlds into existence but who dreams us into existence and continues to dream us into existence and whose dreams for us we may even share in, didn’t acknowledge the god who speaks through Jesus saying that we need no longer think of ourselves as servants but as friends.
Our scripture today, though it uses some of the language associated with authoritarian notions of God, also suggests that a different kind of relationship is possible. In authoritarian language God commands and it is our task to obey. That is the chief virtue of the life of faith, the main thing we are supposed to be as a Christian—obedient. And the main sin is disobedience or rebellion. Not only has this idea been misused by the church to perpetuate unjust social relations, telling people to be submissive and obedient when instead they should be empowered. It is also in my view not a very healthy or attractive way for anyone to relate to God. I do not strive, I’m not sure any of us should so much strive, to be obedient to God. I think of it more as an effort on my part to love God, which is not such an easy thing and is a life-long task. I think of it more as an openness to becoming one with God and to losing myself in God, again something I do very imperfectly and need to stay with. I think of it more as the process of saying yes to God. And all those things mean something different to me than being obedient.
Dismantling is a word we hear a lot these days, and with good reason. There are all sorts of things that need to be dismantled. We talk about dismantling racism, and we hold church workshops on dismantling racism because racism is so deeply embedded in our society and in our personal lives. It is a whole structure of attitudes and policies and relationships, and we talk about our need to dismantle it, begin to take it apart in ourselves and in church life, as well as in the world around us. A plug for the dismantling racism workshop coming up in June. In like manner we are talking about dismantling heterosexism, also a structure of policies and attitudes at all levels of our lives that needs to be undone. We might talk about dismantling the authoritarian theology that is so woven into our language and the way we think and speak about God and the way we imagine ourselves in relation to God, dismantle that theology not in the sense of deciding that we will never again use words like king or lord, but in the sense that it no longer dominates the way we talk and think about God.
We are in a time of dismantling. We are still learning to say no in the ways we need to say no. But of course we need to learn to say yes as well. And all this talk about dismantling this or that and all the energy we put into dismantling, energy that is well spent, it can all perhaps, sometimes, from a certain angle feel just a little bit dispiriting. Too much negativity. Not enough positive faithfulness. But just a couple of quick thoughts about that.
We never say no in any important way without saying yes at the same time. When we say no to something we believe is not right, we are saying yes to something we believe is right. We may need to ask ourselves that question more often—What is it that I do believe in?—not just be able to say what we don’t believe—we may need to ask ourselves that question more often and practice saying out loud what we do believe, but there is a yes implied in every no.
Secondly, the yeses we say that are most true for us, that come from the deepest parts of ourselves, that we are most sure of, and that we base our lives on are the yeses that are the most hard won. We can say we believe in racial justice but that assertion is nothing more than a superficial and temporary expression of good will if we are not willing to struggle through the process of dismantling racism and confronting what that means for us. We can affirm all sorts of things about God but if we have not struggled with what is true for us in our own lives about our relationship to God, then we may not in fact really know what we believe. There is a process of saying no, of deciding what we don’t believe, that is prior to and a necessary part of what we do believe.
Still, having said those things, I do believe, I know it is true for me that there is a need to pray not just for the anger and the courage to say no but for whatever graces may be necessary for me to say yes with my whole heart and soul and being, yes to God, yes to this gorgeous world God has given us, yes to the life we have received as a gift, yes to the people I share it with. Even while we are still learning and working at being able to say no with the strength and determination we need, may we also hope and pray and work at learning to say yes, giving ourselves to a yearning for life, and not caring too much about the accent. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 25, 2003