RELIGIOUS HANGOVER. You can see why the gods who give us our Sunday readings would choose the

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1 RELIGIOUS HANGOVER Is. 43:1-7; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, You can see why the gods who give us our Sunday readings would choose the passage we have before us from Isaiah for this particular Sunday in the Church Year, observed as The Baptism of Our Lord. The first verses of Isaiah 43 could be taken as an anticipation of the ritual of Christian baptism. Writing in the voice of God, Isaiah says to Israel, I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you Think of Jesus as the new Israel, as the early Christians did, and the choice of this passage as a reading for today is obvious. Moreover, the passage seems filled with promise of God s tender care for Israel, which is also a theme woven into Christian baptism. So far, so good. But then, suddenly, things go bad. We read, Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life. What sort of love is this? The suggestion is that other peoples, the ones that God doesn t love quite so much, the ones not honored quite so highly, that these are expendable, that they can be disposed of for the sake of Israel. Monotheism is the belief that there is but one true God. The Jews are credited with inventing monotheism, or perhaps I should say with waking up to it. The peoples in the part of the world inhabited by ancient Israel all had their tribal gods, each tribe having a god or gods to which they were devoted and to which they looked for weal and woe. Tribal rivalries were seen as rivalries between gods, and the tribe that dominated the

2 others would be seen as having the superior god. As must be plain, with this sort of thinking, god is the deification of the tribe and the tribe s interests. Such gods are concerned only with the tribe and want what is best for the tribe, regardless of what happens to anyone else. For those outside the bounds of the tribe, well, let them get their own gods. The beauty of monotheism is that there is but one God for all. The God of monotheism is above all the tribal gods, who are but creatures of the tribes who worship them. The God of monotheism is not a creature at all but rather the Creator of all things, the Creator of all peoples, the God who cares for all and not for some more than others. There is no chauvinism in the God of monotheism, no preference in God for some over others. But here we come upon a problem let us call it Israel s hangover. You see, Israel, too, was a tribe, or more accurately a collection of tribes, and in the beginning it, too, worshiped a tribal god, the god of Israel, the god who was especially attached to Israel and who wanted nothing but the best for Israel. At the same time, however, the God of Israel was understood to be righteous such that Israel s prosperity came from God s righteousness and not simply from God s might and power. It was this conception of God as righteous that led Israel to understand God as One, Creator of the heavens and the earth, God of gods, God of everybody and not just some, caring for all. But it was difficult to get this vision of God clear, and it was clouded by a hangover from the days of tribal thinking, when God belonged to a people rather than the people belonging to God. You can see this in the passage from Isaiah read as our lesson from the Hebrew scriptures this morning.

3 There have been those inclined to think that the cure for Israel s hangover is Christianity, that Christianity is the antidote for religious tribalism and the true expression of monotheism. Would that were the case, but the fact is that there has been a long and terrible history of Christian tribalism, tribalism in the name of Jesus. Not that this was what Jesus wanted any more than Luther wanted a church called Lutheran. Whatever else Jesus was doing, he was doing his best to cure Israel s hangover. He certainly wasn t trying to start a new religion, let alone a religion named after himself. To the contrary, Jesus was killed by religion. But despite Jesus best efforts to fight the tribal construction of religion, his followers decided to become religious themselves, by which I mean they set up a Church that claimed to have the inside track on God and thereby made themselves into a Christian tribe, or it would be more accurate to say into Christian tribes. So the religious hangover of Israel persisted among the Christians and does to this day in all those who would tell you that you can only be saved by holding fast to the dogma of the Church. In preparation for Jesus baptism we are told by John the Baptist that his baptizing with water is not much compared to the baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire that Jesus will introduce. What is the Baptist saying here? Try this. The fire in Jesus baptism is the end of religion, the clearing away of the tendency to religious tribalism. In this sense, religion is over and done for! The Holy Spirit in Jesus baptism is the life of God whose law is love and who is not the possession of any one tribe but rather the One in whom all things live and move and have their being. It is the Holy Spirit, the uncontainable Holy Spirit, who will cure the religious hangover by replacing religion with faith. It is not uncommon to hear the word faith used as a

4 synonym for religion, but this is a mistake. Religion is institutionalized belief as in the Christian religion or the Muslim religion or the Jewish religion, belief systems that are authorized by the tribe. Faith on the other hand is the free response of one spirit to another. In the case of Jesus, we might say that faith is the response of love for love. The voice from heaven says at Jesus baptism, You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. The voice from heaven does not say you must believe this, that, or the other thing. It is the expression of love from the Holy Spirit of God to the child who represents all the children of God. Our friend, Pr. Bruce Davidson, has recently given practical expression to the distinction I have been making between religion and faith in an effort to treat the religious hangover that is rampant in this nation. He was writing about the astonishingly ignorant objection of U.S. Congressman Virgil Goode to his fellow Congressman Keith Ellison s being ceremonially sworn into office with his hand on a copy of the Koran. Congressman Ellison is a convert to Islam. Congressman Goode sees a slippery slope here and fears the day will come when a majority of Congress will be Muslims taking their oath of office on the Koran. You will not be surprised to hear that Congressman Goode is a staunch opponent of any immigration reform that would make the process of immigration to the United States more humane than it is. At the end of his article Bruce writes the following: As a Lutheran Pastor, I can t help thinking of a statement made by Martin Luther in the 16 th Century. The biggest threat to the Germans that Luther lived among was the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, who were, of course, Muslim. Luther said, however, that he would rather be ruled by an honest Turk than a dishonest Christian.

5 That, my friends, is the spirit of faith. That spirit, that Holy Spirit, is the cure for the religious hangover which to this day is so very much with us, clouding our minds, dulling our hearts, constricting our spirits, this religious hangover which keeps us divided up into tribes and keeps us from loving God and loving our neighbors as our faith teaches is the true worship of God. This is the Spirit that, according to our faith, was communicated to the world in the Baptism of Jesus and in turn to us who are baptized in his name. If it seems that in the foregoing I have been biting the hand that feeds me, let me in conclusion restate what it is that I have been saying to you. I am arguing against religion, not against the Church, or at least not against the Church insofar as its work, week in and week out is to break down the walls that divide us and oppose tribalism in any and all of its forms, but most especially the religious tribalism that uses the name of God to set limits on the law of love, this tribalism which is the source of the infamies we commit against one another. This is the Church s job, its calling, insofar as the Church is Spirit-led. There is no other reason to have a clergy or to be a church member other than to become more faithful in expressing the law of love in word and in deed, and it is for the sake of this work that we gather and to which we dedicate ourselves in this New Year. Amen. Baptism of Our Lord, January 7, 2007 Emanuel Lutheran Church