Two Gods, at Least

With the coming out this week of the Nashville Statement, my firm belief that we live in a polytheistic society was buttressed.

The God that I learned about in the Bible was a God who loved everyone. My mother and my Sunday School teachers drummed it into me that God is love, that God sent his son, Jesus the Christ, to spread that message and to exhibit the behavior that said “everybody counts, everybody matters.”

The stories of Jesus hanging out with the marginalized were riveting. There he was, talking, sharing and eating with those who society ignored. There he was, touching the “dirty” and the sick, embracing everyone who dared come near him, because it was the way to live life. It was what God wanted.

The God of the Hebrew scriptures deplored the Empire and its determination to turn people away from the One God to the gods they deemed fit and mandatory to honor. I learned, with fascination, that there is honor and power in worshipping the One God, even if it meant being thrown into a fiery furnace or a lion’s den. I learned that the One God would always “be there,” no matter how bad or prolonged our suffering because of life’s challenges or the evil intent of the government.

I learned in the Gospels that God the Father/Mother had a special place for “the least of these;” I resonated with the 25^th chapter of Matthew where the stories appeared that said that inasmuch as any of us feed, clothe, give water to and visit those who have been cast away, we do it to God. Those who had ignored them had, in effect, ignored God, too.

God, it seemed, didn’t give a hoot about who was “different,” according to society. God loved all because God was the “father” (parent) of us all. God didn’t discriminate against women and poor people and people with leprosy or those who had developmental disabilities. God held all of us, just like a mother and father love a child of theirs who has been born with a cleft lip or palate or some other devastating condition.

That God didn’t care about any of that; all were important; all mattered, including same gender-loving people.

This obsession with sexuality on the part of people who say they love God, is troubling. It is an obsession which has led “God-loving people” to do heinously hateful things to and against people who love the God I just described. It has caused them to put same gender-loving people out of churches; has forced them to remain quiet about who they are as they have listened to sermons putting them down and convincing them they are going to hell. Religious people, many of whom are “evangelical” and “Conservative,” have been rather like an abusive spouse, beating and bullying people because they could, using God as their justification. “The least of these,” including same gender-loving people, yes, but also black and brown people, women, people with disabilities and illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, have been beaten down, over and over, by these religious imposters who throw their weight around in a bag full of hurtful and sanctimonious theology which is counter to the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Bible.

These “evangelicals” who wrote, signed and distributed the Nashville Statement must be like an offering which is putrid to the very nostrils of God. More than once, an angry God in the Hebrew scriptures has denounced the “offerings” of the so-called “holy” and religious. He has said that their worship is an abomination to Him/Her. The spirit of evangelical self-righteousness has been around from the beginning of time. Their god and what their god leads them to do (little “g” intentional) has never been acceptable or pleasing to the One God. I am purposely not lifting any scriptures at this point, because the evangelicals of this ilk love to get into theological debate about them, to prove and bolster their position. Nobody has time for that kind of banter, not now.

In spite of our claiming to be monotheistic in our beliefs, we need to just “fess up” and say we worship two different gods, that Christianity is not characterized by a uniform belief system, but has splintered into a Christianity which believes in excluding people who do not “fit” human definitions of who is worthy to be loved by God and treated with dignity, and a Christianity which has remained stubbornly aligned with the principles taught by the God in the Hebrew Bible and his son, Jesus the Christ.

We have at least two gods in this country and in this world.

The evangelical god, he/she who allows and sanctions homophobia, racism, sexism and all forms of exclusion, is not my god. The evangelical god sees nothing wrong with denigrating the lives and spirits of people whom God created. My God finds that offensive. The evangelical god turns people away from the One God, and toward despair.

The God of Creation finds that despicable.

The Nashville Statement needs to be damned and rejected by all who believe in the One God. Silence is not an option because the God of Creation is a God of love and inclusion. To be silent is to reject the God who made us all.

That is not a good thing.

A candid observation …

(Rev. Dr. Susan K Smith is available for doing workshops on this topic, as well as for workshops on having crazy faith and preaching. Please contact her at revsuekim@sbcglobal.net)

Visit YouTube to see her talk on this subject with Bill Moyers.

Learning Late

All of my life I have been a solitary human being. I seldom reached out to build relationship with people; I almost never sought and cultivated relationships with people in my profession. I did two things: raised my children and tried to run my church.

Because of the way I lived, I grew up and have lived as an adult with a skewed vision of what life is all about. I robbed myself of wonderful relationships which could have helped me emotionally and spiritually in some of the situations in which I found myself. Being in those relationships would have afforded me wise counsel from those whom I trusted and who loved me, and would have allowed me to see that what I was feeling or not feeling was not unique.

People reached out to me, but I did not reach back because I did not know how. I thought that “being there” in a pastoral role for my church members was adequate, but I didn’t realize that “being there” and forming relationships are two different things.

I never asked for help – not for anything. I figured if there was an issue, I’d figure it out, and I normally did, but I did so at the expense of benefitting from people who had “been there, done that” and who could have helped me see things I did not see.

I learned late that the way I was living was not the way to live. I wrote about 15 years ago that I had lived in a cocoon, but writing about it didn’t mean I got out of it. The cocoon was safe, and I stayed inside of it. But safety was not what I needed. I needed to come out of the cocoon and let my wings dry so that I would be able to fly and soar.

I watch people now and see others who live as I lived. I listen to people who say they have few friends. I watch people as they crumble from situations that happen in the lives of all people just because they do not have a support system to help them get through it all.

I was young …and now I am old. In the Christian Bible there is a psalm that says just that: “I have been young and now I am old, yet, I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging for bread.” It occurs to me that one cannot be “righteous,” i.e., be in relationship with God if we are not in relationship with each other.

I, the preacher, have been out of genuine relationship with God because I have not been in relationship with human beings. What a troubling revelation!

When you get older, you start getting things meant to attend to your aging. When you hit age 50, you get sent an automatic registration for the AARP. You get notices about products you can use for incontinence, hearing loss, and aching joints.

What you don’t get, however, are notes to remind you that you still have time to make thigs right in your life, to make relationships, to stop living an isolated life, and to experience life in a new way, be you incontinent, suffering and crippled from arthritis, or both.

What is clear is that being a “late bloomer” is not a bad thing. It is a blessing, a gift, to make sure that for the rest of the days you have on earth, you can live life “abundantly.”

It is hard to begin again when you are older…but it is not impossible. The cocoons in which so many of us have lived are not prisons unless we make them so. They are, instead, self-imposed berths of isolation which have weak seats and thin walls.

We can, in other words, break free.

A candid observation …

The Cowardice of Racists

The unfortunate and tragic events of Charlottesville revealed again that white supremacists live in their hatred but are wont to expose themselves as such.

Charlottesville was different from white hate activities in the past where participants terrorized people of color usually at night, brandishing torches and covering themselves with white sheets so nobody could see who they were.

The participants on Friday night and Saturday were bold and let their faces be shown, partially because they feel empowered and emboldened by the current US president.

But the cowardice pushed through in the violence they committed. Being violent is an easy way out. Trying to kill what you do not understand is an act of cowardice because it keeps one from doing the work of being a human being. It is easy to proclaim hatred for something which one has objectified because it forms Buber’s classic I-it relationship. Such relationships are not “relationships” in the classic sense at all, but rather creates an environment where the object is considered to be non-human and therefore, not worth the time to getting to know and understand.

If I do not regard you as a human being, I cannot empathize with you…and I will not.

That is a cowardly way to live because it gives an excuse for not examining one’s own feelings, and why they are as they are. Racists almost never come face to face with themselves and are therefore capable of destroying the “objects” of their hatred with not a whisk of emotion. That’s why racists in our history were able to lynch black people on, say, a Saturday night and go to church and either take or distribute Holy Communion. In their minds, there is no disconnect. They cannot acknowledge that they are wrong because they do not believe they are wrong.

This was evident in the “statement” given by the president. There was absolutely no compassion, no passion, no anger, no rage – nothing – as he uttered his prepared statement. This from a man who has publicly flogged his attorney general and the former head of the FBI; this from a man who nearly blew his top when acts of terrorism were committed in other countries. But on this occasion, the president was bland and disconnected from the pain and the terror displayed by angry white men who say they are on the road to making America “great again.”

He could show no passion because he has no passion when it comes to racism. His actions to date have indicated that he believes in white supremacy, and the policies coming from his administration indicate that he wants to put it back into its rightful place.

He was being “politically correct” to the likes of David Duke in his statement. He does not want to lose the support of whites who, like him, believe in white supremacy.

And so he buckled under the pressure. He gave a perfunctory statement and seemed uncomfortable doing so. He showed that he is more afraid of the David Dukes of the world than he is of a man like Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin. He did not, could not dare to threaten his white supremacist supporters, keeping true to his tradition of threatening and bullying people with whom he disagrees or who disappoint him.

He agrees with what was done yesterday. And they did not disappoint him.

It is ironic that many of this president’s supporters say they like him because he “tells it like it is.” They say he is “strong,” I guess equating bullying with being strong.

But he doesn’t have the strength to “tell it like it is” when it comes to racism. Few racists do. The white nationalist culture is a tough one and will excommunicate those who fall out of line, if the stories I’ve heard about what happens to those who “defect” are true.

The president showed the cowardly underbelly of the sickness called white supremacy.

He is not strong at all, but as a leader, is about as weak as they come.

A candid observation …

Understanding “Shyness”

I have finally come to an understanding of what being “shy” is all about.

It is about low self-esteem and fear.

I am shy. I am animated when I present, when I preach, when I teach, but when my public performance is over, I am terrified of interacting with people. I am not good at it.

I am afraid to call meetings, even board meetings, because I am afraid of rejection.

I call it shy. It is worse than that.

I am fond of saying that there can be no reconciliation until there is truth- telling. Today, I am telling the truth.

I have never reached out to people. In therapy, I learned that because of my childhood, I learned to be isolated. It was safe. Where there is no interaction, there can be no rejection. My mother was gone …somewhere…and I lived with foster parents. My mother said my biological dad didn’t want me.

Cool. I stayed by myself. My only real connection was with my mother, who was gone somewhere and only came to Detroit, to the home of my foster family, intermittently.

I learned to be a loner.

My entire professional life, I have been a loner. Didn’t seek people out, people who did what I did, who could have helped me and with whom I could have had really good friendships.

I formed a board for Crazy Faith and have never called a meeting because I am afraid.

I have an urge to call for a vigil to address all the craziness that is going on in this country, but have not, because I am afraid. “Shy,” I call it, but it is really fear.

I had learned to be a loner.

As I raised my two children, I realized I had a problem and did see, thank goodness, that life is about relationships. I encouraged, pushed my children to make relationships, which they have done.

Score for me on that one.

But I, who call myself “shy,” who has a ministry called “crazy faith,” and who teaches that fear and faith cannot exist in the same sphere, the same space, live in fear. Fear of rejection, mostly.

Sharing this is scary, but necessary. I am determined to grow.

“Shy” is a misnomer. It is low self-esteem, based on fear of rejection, fear of not being good enough.

A candid observation…

The Cowardice of Bullies

We have all heard it said or have heard it ourselves: “He (she) can give it out but can’t take it.”

We are seeing the truth of that statement being lived out in the current White House.

The man who became president was a bully from the start, throwing his weight around, calling people names, insulting anyone and everyone, especially women. He was defiant and thin-skinned, and unwilling and/or unable to apologize for anything he said. He was “The Donald.” He was tough and strong. He boasted of his business prowess, his sexual prowess and of his ability to keep his base, no matter what.

But this man is one of the weakest people in public office I have ever seen. As soon as he even thinks someone has criticized him, he goes on the attack. He spouts off lies like he is wiping dripping sweat off his brow. He aims to be as insulting as possible …and then complains, whines, if you will, about how “unfair” everyone is to him.

He has shown not strength, but extreme weakness. Anyone who cannot take the heat of being in public office ought not be there; one has to be able to take the blows and keep on going, but this man, so terribly weak, takes valuable time out from governing the nation so that he can retaliate and throw cheap shots at people who have dared cross him.

Not only is he weak in that regard, but he is an absolute sycophant and “friend” to anyone who throws him a compliment. Russian President Vladimir Putin has complimented him and will compliment him again, I am sure, during his face to face with the American president this week. Putin has seen this president’s weakness and will play to it, exploit it and use it to his own advantage.

Our days under this administration have been an ongoing soap opera. We wait every day not for news or for policy announcements, but instead for the next vicious, juvenile “tweet” from a man who should know better. We have a president who never grew up.

What is scary is that he is the leader of the free world – or has been, at least. He has ignored the power he has and has squandered his reputation and the reputation of the country just so that he can have schoolyard-type brawls with those who he feels have disrespected him.

His sycophant surrogates, staff and the Congress have let him have his way. They are afraid of him and what he will do. I am almost sure he threatens people who dare cross him. That is the inherent and unmistakable insecurity that characterize bullies. They use “fake strength” to ward off truth and challenges; they are afraid of failing and falling, and do not have the strength to own up to their weaknesses.

And so, to hide their own deficiencies, they threaten and attack others. They must always remind people of what will happen to them if they don’t march to his drumbeat, and meanwhile, they continue to insult anyone they please.

They are weak, plain and simple.

So many Americans have smiled and said that this president is strong. They like his fiery rhetoric about making America first; they like it that he says he will “knock the hell” out of terrorists. They like it that he has blamed all of America’s problems on “weak” leaders, leaders, he has called stupid and incompetent. They say he is strong because he says what is on his mind.

That isn’t weakness. That’s stupidity, and it’s going to cause America a lot of serious problems. This man is a bully, a man who can “give it out” but surely “cannot take it.”

A candid observation …