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A Letter to Clarence

February 20, 2004

My Dear Clarence:

So you now have a church of your own! Please accept my hearty congratulations. You are probably not aware that I have been following closely your career in the ministry ever since you went to Bible college and then seminary, since we have only exchanged short pleasantries at family gatherings and had little to say otherwise. Nevertheless, your parents, and particularly your Mother, have kept me up to date with announcements, invitations and newspaper clippings that memorialize the milestones in your career.

It is still amazing that the two of us, both from the same middle class, Bapthodisterian (In Florence King's phrase) family could have diverged to the extent that we two have. Neither your parents nor your two sisters have shown any desire to explore religious or philosophical matters, so it has been up to the two of us to make up for the lack of spiritual curiosity that has characterized our clan for the past three generations. You were called early into a Bible-thumping, fire and brimstone, fundamentalist path which, I am compelled to acknowledge, changed you from a wenching, fighting and thieving drunkard at age 19 into an honest chaste citizen, drunk, like the Persian poet Jellaludin Rumi, only on spirit, rather than alcohol.

I, on the other hand, drifted by degree away from the Bapthodisterianism, never abjuring the traditional faith, but finding it increasingly boring and irrelevant. I joined a liturgical church many years ago, and although some things about it that could use some improvement, it seems to me, all in all, closer to the teachings of Jesus than any other church I know.

The occasion of this letter is my discovery of your sermons archived on your church's website, which gave me the opportunity of hearing you preach without missing my own church. Just today, I listened to your most recent sermon, the one that started out with the story of Philip and the Ethiopean that appears in Acts 8, but which almost immediately turned into a sermon on baptism. What caught my attention was your discussion about John the Baptist and his unusual dietary habits in the wilderness and your remark that “environmentalist wackos” would approve of John's eating the locusts and wild honey— “organic stuff,” as you said.

John the Baptist has always fascinated. To me he is the archetype of the sixties' hippie, unconcerned with social or religious convention, deeply spiritual, living in a commune of one in the middle of nowhere. We read his story aloud, sing hymns about him, and preach sermons about him, but we have absolutely no room for his type in our churches or even in our modern world. He is wild and uncouth, and—what is completely unacceptable—he is blunt and honest. He whose mission in life was to announce the presence of the kingdom of God, would not tolerate our idle chitchat for a second. His ranting would quickly get on our nerves. Invite him into your house, and he will open your refrigerator and pointedly ask you why there are hungry people in your town—or in the world—amidst this abundance. We would eject him from our churches for disturbing the peace, especially if he talks during the sermon. We would probably have him committed in short order to a mental institution for treatment with anti psychotic drugs.

Perhaps you don't see a vast discrepancy between John the man and the sanitized John, created for popular consumption. Yet John was important-—important enough to be imprisoned by Herod and ultimately beheaded. Nice guys don’t go to prison. Nice guys aren't beheaded. John was not a nice guy like us. He saw the light, testified to that light, and became a threat to the established order, even though he never raised a finger against it or preached rebellion. Herod is the villain of the story, but in truth, he was no worse than any other puppet ruler the Romans put in power to make their occupation look less like an occupation. The Romans didn't care about what he did as long as he kept order and made sure the taxes were collected. He was no worse than Soviet puppet Walter Ulbricht in East Germany or U.S. puppet Thieu in Vietnam.

But how could a wild man who preached repentance and dunked people in the Jordan River be a threat to Herod and the Roman forces that propped up his regime? For the same reason that the hippies in the ‘60s seemed such a threat to the established order in the United States and other western countries: they rejected our consumerist and militarized society firmly but not violently. They wore long hair and odd clothes, smoked dope and didn't bathe very often. They founded communes in the desert (like Qumram) and explored eastern and native American spirituality. They were as harmless a group of people as you will find outside of a Trappist monastery, but the establishment saw them as a serious threat and literally persecuted them. One of the main modalities of that persecution was the violent and corrupting war on drugs which started around that time, an unwinable undertaking that shredded our constitutional rights and reduced a number of countries in Central and South America to killing fields.

My point? (I hear you ask) Simple: if what you are preaching or what you are doing is appropriate and acceptable, then you probably aren't following in either John's or Christ's footsteps. As the scripture says, the word of the Lord is a sword, but it is difficult to imagine sermons from our pulpits as swords. I would compare them to toothpicks or tongue depressors, not swords. You preach about winning souls to Christ but you are silent about injustice and oppression. Your silence screams louder than all the words you preach. Bishop Romero told the truth from his pulpit in El Salvador and was assassinated by a death squad in front of his congregation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in a Nazi concentration camp. Martin Luther King died a few hours' drive from here for preaching racial justice. Their sermons and speeches were so many swords pointed at evils that in their time were “appropriate” and “acceptable” to the “better sort of people.”

Not very long ago, I suggested to my pastor that we include in our service a special prayer for the civilians of Afghanistan and Iraq who had been rendered homeless or who had lost their loved ones or who had been injured, but was told in no uncertain terms that it couldn't be done. It seemed like a innocuous and reasonable request to me. The clergy, afraid of repercussions from the war's supporters in the congregation, weren't willing to stick out their neck for something so basic as to pray for the victims on the other side. Unlike your church, mine isn't congregational, so the clergy have a certain amount of protection by virtue that they work for a diocese, but even then, they just couldn't do it. Have you prayed for the innocent victims Afghanistan and Iraq? I doubt it. In fact, I haven't heard much about the war coming from any pulpits, either pro or con.

Why this silence? Why were they so reluctant to pray for those innocent victims of war in the middle east? How did such a prayer come to be taboo? I have my own hypothesis, which you may disregard if you like: In democratic nations the overwhelming majority of the population are by disposition opposed to war. To make the war acceptable and to arouse “war fever” requires that, by the use of skillful propaganda, people come to regard the enemy as horribly evil, implacable, and something less than human. Once you dehumanize the enemy it is much easier to bomb his cities, destroy his critical infrastructure, like water, electric and sewer systems, and kill his citizens without pangs of conscience. If the propaganda is successful, doubts about the war will come to be regarded as treasonous, and the skeptics will be forced to keep their mouths shut for fear of reprisal.

Praying for enemies, which we are commanded to do by our Lord, throws sand into the well-oiled workings of a war propaganda machine. Acknowledging that even defensive wars harm and kill innocent noncombatants, including women and children, takes the luster off the workings of the modern military carnage apparatus. People begin to question whether the war is worth all that death and destruction. That happened with Vietnam.

Too often, it seems to me, churches and their pastors enter into an unspoken agreement that the pastor will stay away from certain topics that might ruffle the feathers of his influential congregants, such as the problems camels experience in getting through eyes of needles, or Amos's famous rants against the free-market economy of his day. When a preacher censors his speech out of concern for the delicate sensibilities of the powerful, and fails to speak up against the evils that have become respectable, he has betrayed his calling and ought to find something else to do.

This letter is already too long, so I will reserve taking you to task over your use of the term “environmental wacko” for a later missive. Again, let me congratulate you on your new church. I would love to hear your response to this letter, as it deals with matters close to my heart.

Affectionately your uncle,

Vincent