Listening To Minority Voices
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series II, Cycle B
The endurance of humanity and even the whole cosmos could depend upon giving a serious listening of minority voices. British historian, Arnold Toynbee, has written about the question of humanity's future in sober terms. Toynbee calculated that of 26 known civilizations, sixteen are dead, nine are at the point of death, and our present worldwide civilization is very much in question. Our future might depend upon on listening to the disturbing, but salving minority voices.
We cannot heed all those minority voices that vie for attention. Some minority voices are blatantly self-serving or filled with suicidal destructiveness, like those that called for the Jews to rebel against Rome in 70 C.E. This foolishness resulted in a crushing defeat and the dispersal of the Jews from their homeland. It is clear that unwise radical minority voices pushed the American South into secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Carl Sandburg tells about the dangerous minority voice of William Lowdnes Yancey, of Alabama. Yancey, with his inflammatory oratory urged the South toward disunion. Sandburg writes, "His living voice had magnetized many a barbecue audience and led men to clutch imaginary weapons and spring forward to meet a fancied foe." Oblivious of neither the political nor the moral consequences of secession, Yancey was for revolution. Sandburg continues, "He had said so often that a hurricane is healthy for cleaning out scum and miasma. He took to the floor (at the Alabama secessionist convention) ... to declare the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln an insult and a menace. Even though the convention found his words excessive and dangerous, they were sentiments long declared by the minority voices of southern Yanceys that moved even the moderates into the death-dealing resolve to secede."
If Sandburg is not your cup of tea, then take it from Margaret Mitchell's novel and movie, Gone With The Wind. Mitchell was no academic historian, but she recognized that there were hosts of careless minority voices in the South driving the nation into the horrors of the Civil War.
Biblical Tradition And Dangerous Minority Voices
We can see this same thing in the biblical story as it struggled with dangerous minority voices. Some of these were present at the time of Jesus. Some minority voices declared that holiness before God meant separation from the common life. So the Essenes opted for celibacy and withdrawal, going to the desert to await God's intervention. This guaranteed their demise. They weren't concerned about future renewal, since God was about to act. This style of holiness possessed no possibility for future and self-renewal. Other minority voices in the first century defined holiness as separation through moral purity and cultic emphasis. But this option was available only to the few who could financially adopt this restrictive holiness. Certainly the Pharisees do not always get a fair shake in the New Testament. However, their minority voice became a possibility only for the affluent, often resulting in an unattractive self-righteousness. Jesus, holding a more inclusive sense of holiness, resisted their claim. These minority voices never captured the interest or attention of Jesus.
The ministry and message of Paul also rejected the minority voices offering dangerous promises. Paul disassociated himself and his converts from the seductive minority voices of his Greco-Roman world. We can easily list the minority voices he rejected -- the restrictive version of Torah Christianity, gnostic world-denial, charismatic confusion, the cult of personality, and ecclesiastical elitism. Any one of these minority voices invited disaster to the gospel and they continue to do so in our own time, too.
Many current Christians find the early creeds of the church to be a nightmarish mix of biblical urgency and Greek philosophy. Yet these creeds molded a unity of Christian conviction that preserved the church against dissolution. The creeds set themselves against minority voices poised to render the church nice, but irrelevant. Rejecting the minority voices surrounding the formation of our early creeds may have saved the gospel as a serious voice in human history. Today we need to be aware of the dangerous minority voices lurking within and around the Christian life and faith.
There Are Godly Minority Voices That Invite Our Attention
On this first Sunday of Lent, we have this passage from 1 Peter before us, a call to suffer for the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Christians always need this voice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great heroic Christian spirits standing against the evils of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, said when Christ puts his claim on us "he calls us to come and die." For Bonhoeffer, laying aside his pacifist credo and taking part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler was of great and ultimately mortal risk. His voice was a minority one. Most German Christians joined their faith to Hitler's cause. Only a few, like Bonhoeffer, were willing to speak and accept the suffering that inevitably came with voicing the minority protest. Speaking this minority voice cost Bonhoeffer his life -- hung by his Nazi captors only a few days before the war was over. Suffering, intentionally assumed for Christ, is always a voice we need to hear.
However, there is another voice in this text, a minority one. The text says that after the cross and the resurrection, Jesus "went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison." This means the early Christians reflected on what happened between Jesus' crucifixion and his resurrection. In this interim they daringly proclaimed that Jesus went into the central precincts of hell and offered salvation to the damned.
Immediately, we recognize the minority status of this voice. The dominant Christian voice of God's offer of salvation in Christ shouts, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). This slams the door shut on proclaiming a more generous view of God's grace. This exclusive majority voice is what drove the early church's evangelistic thrust. This is what under-girded the nineteenth-century missionary enterprise of the Protestant church.
A biography of the great missionary, David Livingston, tells how he went fearlessly into the unknowns of central Africa, burdened by the thought that millions of Africans would perish without Christ. Such self-sacrificing commitment was commonplace in those times. It is often repeated by many of the conservative evangelical traditions. One older Christian told how she, being a third-generation child of American Baptist missionaries to India, at nine years of age, was put on a ship taking her to America for schooling. We of our child-centered families can hardly imagine such a painful separating decision. However, it was done repeatedly in those times because the missionary work had a stern mood about it commanding that missionary parents be willing to hurl their young children off to the care of their homeland church. If there is no salvation outside a confession of Christ then this makes impeccable logic and is the reluctant but imperative outcome of the missionary enterprise.
However, occasionally there are minority voices challenging the dominant, majority voice on this issue. Chryostom of Alexandria was one challenger in the fifth century. The New England Universalists of the 1800s made the same claim -- God's grace can overcome all human ignorance or resistance to God's love, here or in the hereafter. In the modern church, some have ventured this minority voice in what the hymn calls, "the wideness of God's mercy." Prominent twentieth-century theologian, Emil Brunner, declared that the grace of God in Jesus Christ saves all humanity. The difference between Christians and non-Christians is not that Christians are saved and all others are not. The Christian difference is that we know that salvation is granted to all.
Reinhold Niebuhr once said that people are "charmed" into faith, not by terror, self-seeking, or by logic. Our times and our world call for the church to listen to this minority voice, too. The glad, good news of Christ is our best and only lasting evangelistic possibility.
Other Minority Voices Needing A Hearing
History is rough on wrapping the gospel in a comfortable package called, "the faith once and for all delivered to the saints." There is a proper understanding of such a statement meaning that our faith in the reality of God's grace in Christ is constant and unwavering. However, the "once and for all" element is not a guarantee that our statements of the faith in human words and images will never call for modification, revamping, and sometimes the abandonment of certain elements. As we move through history, circumstances and insights change, so that yesterday's faith package becomes a burden and shoves us into irrelevance. We must listen carefully to the minority voices that speak through our struggles and witness to the faith. Often these bring fresh and more meaningful understandings of the gospel and what God wants from us.
A young theological student journeyed to the Graduate Theological Union surrounding the campus of the University of California at Berkeley to work toward a Ph.D. His advisor was Claude Welch, one of the founders of GTU. Welch's career centered on the history of modern Protestant theology. The student learned that some Protestant thinkers were listening to an array of minority voices of that time. Some of these voices were critical of traditional biblical understanding, Darwinian natural science, the witness of non-Christian religions, and of the dominant economic and political arrangements. Welch's saga indicates his paying significant attention to the minority voices of that era, has saved the gospel for the modern world. It linked itself to modern secular truth claims, while pointing out many invalid and debatable axioms of traditions and modernity.
Our Lenten pilgrimage can be a serious listening to the minority voices from our own time. Biblically, one of these voices might be Amos' insistence that only justice and righteousness count with God. For Jesus, we need to listen to his minority voice that success with God is being the servant of others. Paul's minority voice to us could be his insistence that we are embedded in a Christ-love from which we cannot fall. In addition, the minority voice of Revelation needing a constant hearing, is its voice declaring God -- everlastingly set against worldly oppression and might.
Other minority voices in our Christian tradition meriting a Lenten hearing might be from Martin Luther. He insisted that the godly life is always a risk in faith, never a comfortable certainty. Catherine of Sienna's minority voice gets it right in telling us that neighbor need trumps our worship and devotional commitments. John Wesley becomes a minority Lenten voice reminding us that the Christian life is inextricably social and connected to others, never a private matter. Cardinal John Henry Newman's great hymn, "Lead Kindly Light" needs our hearing, too. In it, Newman points to those moments when the kindly light allows us only the next step, and not a certainty of the way or the conclusion. Walter Rauschenbush has a vital minority voice when he said that our social structures need saving, just as much as our personal hearts. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony came together as a single minority voice saying political and civil rights are gender blind. Albert Schweitzer became a saving minority voice as he lived out the truth that worldly blessedness implies caring for that less favored by worldly arrangements.
Eleanor Roosevelt's minority voice calls us to committing ourselves to using political and economic power to assuage the suffering of the poor and needy. The minority voice of Reinhold Niebuhr has cleared out illusions about our easy ability to live the Christian life and to infuse justice into our social and political structures. Dag Hammarskjold has become a minority voice affirming that real mystical moments drive us into the heart of neighbor service. Mother Teresa's minority voice holds up a checklist for Christian living by asking us how much we dare to side with the sick and dying have-nots. Pope John XXIII became a minority voice when he reminded us that God has disciples in the quest for a peaceful world that will never make a personal Christian confession of faith. Episcopal Bishop James Robinson is a newer minority voice tellingly declaring that loving, committed, and faithful sexual relationships leap over the dominant traditional voices of what marriage means.
The book of Hebrews says a great cloud of witnesses surrounds Christians. Hebrews implies that these witnesses are mainly minority voices. We must listen to them carefully, lest none of us hear them at all. However, if in Lent we could once again hear these voices, we would experience a salvation that is worldly and everlasting, painful yet joyful, and becoming for us the wonderful gift of God. This can make our Lenten journey a very special moment. Lent could be a time for this discovery.
We cannot heed all those minority voices that vie for attention. Some minority voices are blatantly self-serving or filled with suicidal destructiveness, like those that called for the Jews to rebel against Rome in 70 C.E. This foolishness resulted in a crushing defeat and the dispersal of the Jews from their homeland. It is clear that unwise radical minority voices pushed the American South into secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Carl Sandburg tells about the dangerous minority voice of William Lowdnes Yancey, of Alabama. Yancey, with his inflammatory oratory urged the South toward disunion. Sandburg writes, "His living voice had magnetized many a barbecue audience and led men to clutch imaginary weapons and spring forward to meet a fancied foe." Oblivious of neither the political nor the moral consequences of secession, Yancey was for revolution. Sandburg continues, "He had said so often that a hurricane is healthy for cleaning out scum and miasma. He took to the floor (at the Alabama secessionist convention) ... to declare the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln an insult and a menace. Even though the convention found his words excessive and dangerous, they were sentiments long declared by the minority voices of southern Yanceys that moved even the moderates into the death-dealing resolve to secede."
If Sandburg is not your cup of tea, then take it from Margaret Mitchell's novel and movie, Gone With The Wind. Mitchell was no academic historian, but she recognized that there were hosts of careless minority voices in the South driving the nation into the horrors of the Civil War.
Biblical Tradition And Dangerous Minority Voices
We can see this same thing in the biblical story as it struggled with dangerous minority voices. Some of these were present at the time of Jesus. Some minority voices declared that holiness before God meant separation from the common life. So the Essenes opted for celibacy and withdrawal, going to the desert to await God's intervention. This guaranteed their demise. They weren't concerned about future renewal, since God was about to act. This style of holiness possessed no possibility for future and self-renewal. Other minority voices in the first century defined holiness as separation through moral purity and cultic emphasis. But this option was available only to the few who could financially adopt this restrictive holiness. Certainly the Pharisees do not always get a fair shake in the New Testament. However, their minority voice became a possibility only for the affluent, often resulting in an unattractive self-righteousness. Jesus, holding a more inclusive sense of holiness, resisted their claim. These minority voices never captured the interest or attention of Jesus.
The ministry and message of Paul also rejected the minority voices offering dangerous promises. Paul disassociated himself and his converts from the seductive minority voices of his Greco-Roman world. We can easily list the minority voices he rejected -- the restrictive version of Torah Christianity, gnostic world-denial, charismatic confusion, the cult of personality, and ecclesiastical elitism. Any one of these minority voices invited disaster to the gospel and they continue to do so in our own time, too.
Many current Christians find the early creeds of the church to be a nightmarish mix of biblical urgency and Greek philosophy. Yet these creeds molded a unity of Christian conviction that preserved the church against dissolution. The creeds set themselves against minority voices poised to render the church nice, but irrelevant. Rejecting the minority voices surrounding the formation of our early creeds may have saved the gospel as a serious voice in human history. Today we need to be aware of the dangerous minority voices lurking within and around the Christian life and faith.
There Are Godly Minority Voices That Invite Our Attention
On this first Sunday of Lent, we have this passage from 1 Peter before us, a call to suffer for the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Christians always need this voice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great heroic Christian spirits standing against the evils of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, said when Christ puts his claim on us "he calls us to come and die." For Bonhoeffer, laying aside his pacifist credo and taking part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler was of great and ultimately mortal risk. His voice was a minority one. Most German Christians joined their faith to Hitler's cause. Only a few, like Bonhoeffer, were willing to speak and accept the suffering that inevitably came with voicing the minority protest. Speaking this minority voice cost Bonhoeffer his life -- hung by his Nazi captors only a few days before the war was over. Suffering, intentionally assumed for Christ, is always a voice we need to hear.
However, there is another voice in this text, a minority one. The text says that after the cross and the resurrection, Jesus "went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison." This means the early Christians reflected on what happened between Jesus' crucifixion and his resurrection. In this interim they daringly proclaimed that Jesus went into the central precincts of hell and offered salvation to the damned.
Immediately, we recognize the minority status of this voice. The dominant Christian voice of God's offer of salvation in Christ shouts, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). This slams the door shut on proclaiming a more generous view of God's grace. This exclusive majority voice is what drove the early church's evangelistic thrust. This is what under-girded the nineteenth-century missionary enterprise of the Protestant church.
A biography of the great missionary, David Livingston, tells how he went fearlessly into the unknowns of central Africa, burdened by the thought that millions of Africans would perish without Christ. Such self-sacrificing commitment was commonplace in those times. It is often repeated by many of the conservative evangelical traditions. One older Christian told how she, being a third-generation child of American Baptist missionaries to India, at nine years of age, was put on a ship taking her to America for schooling. We of our child-centered families can hardly imagine such a painful separating decision. However, it was done repeatedly in those times because the missionary work had a stern mood about it commanding that missionary parents be willing to hurl their young children off to the care of their homeland church. If there is no salvation outside a confession of Christ then this makes impeccable logic and is the reluctant but imperative outcome of the missionary enterprise.
However, occasionally there are minority voices challenging the dominant, majority voice on this issue. Chryostom of Alexandria was one challenger in the fifth century. The New England Universalists of the 1800s made the same claim -- God's grace can overcome all human ignorance or resistance to God's love, here or in the hereafter. In the modern church, some have ventured this minority voice in what the hymn calls, "the wideness of God's mercy." Prominent twentieth-century theologian, Emil Brunner, declared that the grace of God in Jesus Christ saves all humanity. The difference between Christians and non-Christians is not that Christians are saved and all others are not. The Christian difference is that we know that salvation is granted to all.
Reinhold Niebuhr once said that people are "charmed" into faith, not by terror, self-seeking, or by logic. Our times and our world call for the church to listen to this minority voice, too. The glad, good news of Christ is our best and only lasting evangelistic possibility.
Other Minority Voices Needing A Hearing
History is rough on wrapping the gospel in a comfortable package called, "the faith once and for all delivered to the saints." There is a proper understanding of such a statement meaning that our faith in the reality of God's grace in Christ is constant and unwavering. However, the "once and for all" element is not a guarantee that our statements of the faith in human words and images will never call for modification, revamping, and sometimes the abandonment of certain elements. As we move through history, circumstances and insights change, so that yesterday's faith package becomes a burden and shoves us into irrelevance. We must listen carefully to the minority voices that speak through our struggles and witness to the faith. Often these bring fresh and more meaningful understandings of the gospel and what God wants from us.
A young theological student journeyed to the Graduate Theological Union surrounding the campus of the University of California at Berkeley to work toward a Ph.D. His advisor was Claude Welch, one of the founders of GTU. Welch's career centered on the history of modern Protestant theology. The student learned that some Protestant thinkers were listening to an array of minority voices of that time. Some of these voices were critical of traditional biblical understanding, Darwinian natural science, the witness of non-Christian religions, and of the dominant economic and political arrangements. Welch's saga indicates his paying significant attention to the minority voices of that era, has saved the gospel for the modern world. It linked itself to modern secular truth claims, while pointing out many invalid and debatable axioms of traditions and modernity.
Our Lenten pilgrimage can be a serious listening to the minority voices from our own time. Biblically, one of these voices might be Amos' insistence that only justice and righteousness count with God. For Jesus, we need to listen to his minority voice that success with God is being the servant of others. Paul's minority voice to us could be his insistence that we are embedded in a Christ-love from which we cannot fall. In addition, the minority voice of Revelation needing a constant hearing, is its voice declaring God -- everlastingly set against worldly oppression and might.
Other minority voices in our Christian tradition meriting a Lenten hearing might be from Martin Luther. He insisted that the godly life is always a risk in faith, never a comfortable certainty. Catherine of Sienna's minority voice gets it right in telling us that neighbor need trumps our worship and devotional commitments. John Wesley becomes a minority Lenten voice reminding us that the Christian life is inextricably social and connected to others, never a private matter. Cardinal John Henry Newman's great hymn, "Lead Kindly Light" needs our hearing, too. In it, Newman points to those moments when the kindly light allows us only the next step, and not a certainty of the way or the conclusion. Walter Rauschenbush has a vital minority voice when he said that our social structures need saving, just as much as our personal hearts. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony came together as a single minority voice saying political and civil rights are gender blind. Albert Schweitzer became a saving minority voice as he lived out the truth that worldly blessedness implies caring for that less favored by worldly arrangements.
Eleanor Roosevelt's minority voice calls us to committing ourselves to using political and economic power to assuage the suffering of the poor and needy. The minority voice of Reinhold Niebuhr has cleared out illusions about our easy ability to live the Christian life and to infuse justice into our social and political structures. Dag Hammarskjold has become a minority voice affirming that real mystical moments drive us into the heart of neighbor service. Mother Teresa's minority voice holds up a checklist for Christian living by asking us how much we dare to side with the sick and dying have-nots. Pope John XXIII became a minority voice when he reminded us that God has disciples in the quest for a peaceful world that will never make a personal Christian confession of faith. Episcopal Bishop James Robinson is a newer minority voice tellingly declaring that loving, committed, and faithful sexual relationships leap over the dominant traditional voices of what marriage means.
The book of Hebrews says a great cloud of witnesses surrounds Christians. Hebrews implies that these witnesses are mainly minority voices. We must listen to them carefully, lest none of us hear them at all. However, if in Lent we could once again hear these voices, we would experience a salvation that is worldly and everlasting, painful yet joyful, and becoming for us the wonderful gift of God. This can make our Lenten journey a very special moment. Lent could be a time for this discovery.
