Fletcher Chmara-Huff
First Baptist Church of Granville
July 26, 2008
Peace, tolerance, and other problematic terms…
When I first began working on this sermon in earnest, I wanted to title it “Seven words you should never say in Church.” I had been mulling over what specifically I wanted to preach about for a while, and my first draft was written in the week following the death of George Carlin. However, to address seven words would make for much too long a sermon in a non-evangelical church such as this one, and there are probably more than seven that we should reconsider. So today I am only going to pick on two words, peace and tolerance. I leave it to others to think about other words and perhaps expand the list, perhaps even share your thoughts as I am now doing.
Those of you who heard me preach before, know that I am concerned with the fact that religion, as practiced in the 20th century, has become too comfortable.
One of the areas I have noticed that suffers from a comfortable settling in is through the language those of us in faith communities like to use. Some words I think, while good words, have become problematic, because we never interrogate the meanings of the words, and we assume that those meanings are fixed. We don’t actively debate about words with complex meaning because when we say them, we know what we mean, and it is easy enough to assume that others know what we mean. But words, as signifiers, are actually quite fluid. This fluidity of meaning is my concern because of that old aphorism “something was lost in translation.”
Translation is something that is always in play, even in your native language. My general concern over shifting meanings that become attached to words is why I want to propose that there are some words we should stop using in churches, or at least carefully specify what we mean if and when we do use them. I am not alone in these concerns. Religious scholars of the Abrahamic tradition have institutionalized discussions over the meaning of words and phrases since the very beginnings of our faith tradition. Talmudic studies, the Protestant Reformation, and Sharia courts come easily to mind. While I cannot hope to resolve millennia of debate over the meaning of passages in holy text and law in the next fifteen minutes, I think it important for us as members of a faith community to at least engage the debates with questioning minds.
Both of the words I am singling out today, peace and tolerance, are getting more than their fair share of use nowadays, and not just in churches. But both words come with baggage, and I think it is important to unpack those bags and think about what we mean when we use those words.
First off, I want to do away with peace, at least one of the meanings that it carries. How can I say this in a Christian church, filled with followers of the “Prince of Peace?” In preparing for this sermon, I reread the gospels, I read about Quakers, Mennonites, the Amish, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and other participants in peaceful movements. From these readings I have come to a conclusion about what peace is not. While it is difficult in a time of seemingly endless war to think of peace in other contexts, PEACE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF WAR, or even the absence of conflict! I think that too often we offer prayers for peace with this end in mind. Violence is indeed a deplorable thing, and I would rather live in a world without war. But the peace that Christian teaching offers is does not seek this end alone. The absence of war is more like a side effect of peaceful practice.
In the Christian tradition, there is a moment when we share peace within our worship service. While I can appreciate the way we practice this in our faith community by exchanging hellos and welcoming visitors, building a social and friendly church body, more traditional churches engage in a specific ritual. I am a firm believer in the power of ritual, and to some degree I miss it here. The exchanging of the peace follows the form of:
“God’s peace be with you”,
And the response is always “And also with you.”
This is a firmly rooted tradition, as we see throughout the Abrahamic tradition, through the invocations ‘Shalom Aleichem’ and ‘As-salaamu Alaikum’. God’s Peace is wished upon your fellow travelers in this life.
What is this peace that is invoked and wished for? While I chose Mark’s version of the story of Jesus and the money-changers for this morning’s reading, in John we can read that Jesus actually whipped people for defiling the temple. This is certainly a violent act. Elsewhere we can read the invocation to ‘turn the other cheek,’ a practice of asking someone to hit you again, in effect encouraging more violence. What then is the peace that we as Christians should be seeking, if not a flat out end to violence? My reading of the gospels suggests that the peace of god is often associated with struggle, resistance, and sometimes, even violence. Taken in total, the bible can be read as a pretty nasty text, filled with just wars, stonings, floggings, and the ultimate violence of our tradition, the murder of Jesus, all while searching for God’s Peace. This is scary stuff, things we would rather overlook in our so-called peaceful tradition. In comfort seeking, some people have a tendency to do away with the bible in anything but small doses. Peace becomes not a radical way to face the world, but a turning away.
But real peace, the peace of God, is not about these human foibles. One of the things that Jesus had to learn was how to be fully human, with all the contradictions, violence, and uncertainty that comes along with our human lives. Jesus had to learn how to live in the world, as a flawed part of it. I see the violence towards the money-changers as evidence that no human is perfect, no matter how divine his origin. Christ solved a problem in a very human fashion.
Yet Jesus had the peace of a relationship with God to see him through. This peace is not the absence of war, conflict or strife, rather it is a radical state of being in which we achieve certitude of our loved status by following God’s will. When entering this state, we can recognize that God walks with us in the worst of circumstances, and he will be there for us in the afterlife. If someone threatens us, it is only human to want to respond. We can avoid the situation, or fight back if need be, and when and how to fight back is often a difficult decision because we mistake peace for the absence of conflict.
When we pray for peace, we should not calling for an end to conflict, but the fortitude to actively deal with that conflict in a just and righteous manner; along with a knowledge that in the end, everything will be all right because we were righteous. This, I think, is what people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King came to understand about seeking peace. This is how they were able to accept that violence would eventually end their lives.
That being said, there is an awfully big however, that I think must accompany God’s Peace. As I see it, it is not enough to simply seek the peace of God, consider yourself saved, and call it a day. This kind of half-hearted seeking of God’s peace is what leads to the second word that troubles me, tolerance.
Tolerance is something that has been in western discourse for a long time. The United States even institutionalized tolerance when the National Conference for Community and Justice declared the third week of February “National Brotherhood Week.” Tom Lehrer wrote a song about this movement, and prefaced the song with the statement, “There are some people who do not love their fellow man, and I HATE people like that.” He then went on to sing:
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week
It's National be kind to that
Other-hood Week
Go on and shake the hand
Of someone you can’t stand
It's only for a week, so have no fear
Just be glad it doesn't last all year!
In that spirit, I have to say, I am sick to death of tolerance.
As I see the word tolerance used, it means learning to put up with difference, a live and let live approach. On the surface, this appears to be a good thing. I appreciate the many different ways of being human. I accept that there may be many ways of coming to God. I have no problem with a heartfelt sense of ecumenical love. I think it was brilliant of Gandhi, when asked if he was a practicing Hindu, to respond “Yes, but I am also a Christian, and a Moslem, and a Jew.” I cannot however, find acceptable the lassez-faire attitude that some senses of tolerance lead towards. Tolerance, in the extreme sense, allows all comers to have not only a seat at the table, but also an equal weight. Equality for all, it sounds good doesn’t it?
Where I see a slippery slope is when tolerance becomes either a state of non-committal for fear of offending someone, or grounds to maintain resentment and difference. In regards to non-committal, Reading the gospels, I am acutely aware that Jesus was not a tolerant person. When someone was wrong, he bluntly called them on it. “Repent and sin no more,” or ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations?’ But _you*_ made it a ‘hideout for robbers!’ There are ways that we as Christians are called to live by example, law, and parable; I am arguing that the meek form of tolerance where “anything goes” is not the path to take. While there is room for all at the table, you still have to play by the rules. We teach our children how to behave when they go to a restaurant, and let them know what the accepted rules are, I think it is too easy to forget that there are rules for coming to Christ’s table, all in the name of tolerance.
I am willing to concede that what exactly these rules are can be difficult to discern. When preparing a sermon, like any good academic endeavor, one has to look at the primary source material. I reread the gospels quickly, and I have to say there are some confusing passages. Each author made his own decisions about what to include, how to phrase it, and contextualized it in the time and place it was written. As I mentioned earlier, there is a long tradition of arguing over how to interpret the text, and the passages that seem to contradict each other, or even worse, don’t say what we think they should. These texts are however, what we have as our foundation, and we need to thoughtfully honor them if we wish to call ourselves a Christian, let alone Baptist, Church. We cannot simply ignore the foundations of our faith in the name of tolerance, and call ourselves a Christian church.
The resentment aspect of tolerance is perhaps even more insidious. This is what Tom Lehrer was joking about in the introduction to his song. We painfully joke amongst outside of worship that we should learn to be a more tolerant congregation. We strive to be more inclusive than other congregations, but that welcoming mission has perhaps made us intolerant of other congregations. It seems sometimes, that there is an active effort not to be like other Christian churches, because of whom those churches exclude.
There is another path, one that I think was followed in the past at First Baptist, and one that I suggest that we actively seek out again in order to become a stronger church community. This is a mode of thinking and acting that William Connolly has termed “agonistic respect.” It is a different approach to the pluralism that we encounter in the world, without the apathy or the doctrine of “anything goes” that I think has become associated with tolerance. According to Wikipedia, “Agonism is a political theory which emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict, but seeks to show how we might accept and channel this positively.” Conflict is a driver of change. Things can’t get better with tolerance, conflict is what allows problems to be recognized and responded to. Furthermore, “Agonism implies a deep respect and concern for the other.” Does this deep respect and concern for the other ring any bells? While Connolly claims to have received the idea from Kant, it was from a paraphrase by Kant of the rule to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Agonistic respect is a mode of respect that requires one to be open to criticism as well as free to criticize. One should only be willing to criticize if one is willing to be treated in the same manner. It is the opposite of tolerance, as it requires struggle, as well as the ability to admit that you may be wrong.
In seeking to become an open and affirming church, the freedom to criticize was openly embraced. This was not a tolerant stand that avoided conflict, this was respectfully disagreeing and picking a fight because of a conviction that you were in the right. The passage from Luke was taken to heart, “judge of yourselves the righteous [thing].” And the people of this church did not walk away from this conflict unscathed. They were hurt by the fight, and effectively the parent organization of FBC figuratively “kicked the congregation out of the house” like an insolent teenager.
The congregation entered the conflict expecting to be treated with respect, but over the years, people have expressed to me that they felt unprepared for what came after. The hurt feelings, the drifting away from mainline Christianity, the loss of members who were looking for a different kind of community, and a wariness of new members who don’t share that corporate memory.
BUT HERE’S THE THING… As I understand that particular conflict, the struggle was to have an inclusive Christian community. A place to come together, joyfully worship our God, to learn and teach about what is right, to raise our children in a church community free from oppression and fear, and to allow people excluded by other churches for their differences, to join us in Christian fellowship. Yet sometimes I feel like rather than abandoning an injustice within the Christian tradition, Christianity itself was abandoned. The good news is, the battle for the church has been won. You have a church that doesn’t exclude anyone from sitting at the table; you have that freedom. There are other big fights before us, to be sure. There is injustice in the world, and I applaud our efforts to move out into the world. But the struggle that I ask you to think about today, is how after all the hurt, the injustice, and the struggle, we reaffirm our sense of what is right and return to the goals of the struggle for inclusion. How do we stop being tolerant, and learn to again become a Christian community and respectfully and productively face our conflicts as we seek God’s Peace? For instance, is being open and affirming really about watching for gender inclusive language, or is it about genuinely including people? What are the important fights, and what should be left aside? How do we make all people know they are welcome to sit with us and seek the Peace of God? How do we actually get something done in a committee, and move past the conflicts into supporting the body of the church?
Maybe that last one is asking too much…
We can decide for ourselves what is right, that is true. But only when we seek God’s Peace do I think we can be sure what is right. And then, I think we can learn to stop being that church on the corner that caused all the controversy, and instead be joyful participants in Christ’s work.
Peace be with you!
