The Church and the Confederate flag

I am departing from my usual format of scripture meditations taken from the Daily Office Lectionary to address an issue that has been bubbling in my mind for many years, occasionally bursting out in what seems to me a mixture of compassion and wrath.  To one side of the issue, I will seem to be preaching to the choir.  To the other side, I will be dismissed as having been brainwashed by the liberal media.  But I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s about more than one issue.  And ultimately, kindness to my neighbor is about more than just refusing to condone the Confederate flag.

I am inclined to say that there are many views about the Confederate flag (which by this point we all know was not the national flag of the Confederate States of America but in fact the battle flag of the Virginian army) but there are only three.  As a friend of mine described it, it is “what a flag meant, what it means to some today, and what it means to most everyone else today.”  What it meant, most charitably, was “I am going to fight for my state’s freedom to self-govern without interference from the Federal government.”  This is entirely skating over which issues might have been under threat from the government.  What it means to some today is “Southern pride” or “Southern cultural values”.  What it means to most everyone else today is, simply, white supremacy.

What I would expect from the Confederate flag if it were a symbol of a state’s right to govern itself is to see it waved at rallies opposing the Federal government.  It would be brought out as an act of rebellion, a statement that if you carry through with this action we may secede.  It would be a relatively extreme statement and we wouldn’t expect to see it often.  Alternately, we might see it waved as a continuous statement that we are always in danger of seceding and refuse to accept the Union or the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War.  At its most denotative interpretation, it is a statement that I am ready to commit treason against the United States.

The response to the treason charge?  We are told throughout scripture to submit to the authorities over us, and particularly government authorities.  I’m relatively certain that this rules out treason, unless it is directly a choice between committing treason or renouncing our faith.

In response to the way that some people view the flag, as a symbol of Southern values and pride, I would also have an expectation.  Namely, I would expect to see this flag flown by one major demographic: Southerners.  This would include all races, because this flag is only about the South and has nothing to do with race.  Black people would wave it proudly, because it’s about their home.  And we wouldn’t expect to see it often outside of the South, unless it’s at the home of a transplanted Southerner or someone who really appreciates Southern culture.  But this flag isn’t flown by Southerners; it is flown by white people.  It is only flown by white people.

Now let’s look at what the majority of the world sees when we see that flag.  The most prominent image in my mind is that flag being waved by men in white hoods.  It began as a banner under which to fight for my state’s right to self-govern, then once the war ended it became a banner under which to fight for my race’s right to murder another race.  It is relevant that most people also get very focused on the issue that seemed to be at stake in the Civil War.  So the flag started as a banner to fight for my right to own my fellow man (who, incidentally, I do not see as a human being or at least an equal human being) and it became a banner under which to kill my fellow man (who I still do not see as an [equal] human being).  It started as either a symbol of racism or treason, it quickly became a symbol of racism.  (The treason is rarely considered these days, because it’s buried under the mountain of racism.)

Historically, the Confederate flag has never been a positive symbol in the way that, for instance, the Christian cross is a positive symbol.  For most of its life, the cross has been a symbol of hope.  Hope for forgiveness because of Christ’s death on the cross.  It is also a statement that I am willing to take up my cross, to die to my self, as Jesus requires.  But atrocities were committed under the cross, and some people may find it offensive.  They might be hurt because you display the cross.  In this case, I would see the cross as an emblem that could still be displayed, because the cross was only co-opted as a banner under which to kill.  Yes, at one point it was co-opted by a segment of history, serving as the banner under which Europe prosecuted the Crusades.  But at its beginning it was a good symbol and throughout most of its history and by most people who have used it, it has remained a good symbol.  The symbol of the cross is altogether different from the symbol of the Confederate flag.

For many, the Confederate flag is a reminder that there was a time when people were enslaved simply for having their skin color.  It is a reminder that after their owners were forced to free them (after fighting a war that may or may not have been about this issue) people still treated them like they were not human beings.  It is a reminder of segregation, of being forced to live in poorer neighborhoods, of being less likely to be able to find work and far more likely to be jailed, of the systemic hatred that follows them simply because of the color of their skin.  For many, the Confederate flag reminds them “The side that was fighting for you won the war.  But you still lost.”  It is a reminder that they will not be accepted as full members of society because of the color of their skin.

Black people in this country are constantly being told that their lives and their experiences are not valid or do not matter.  When they are offended, they are not heard.  Instead, they are told that they should not be offended because we don’t mean anything offensive.  When they say that a symbol is hurtful or offensive, they are insulted, being told that they do not understand history or the meaning of a symbol.  So we heap harm upon harm, further dividing our country and the church.

So here is the crux of the issue:  We as Christians are called to die to ourselves, to consider others better than ourselves.  We are given the example of St. Paul who was willing to only eat vegetables rather than give offense to those who might be harmed by his eating meat because that meat might possibly have been sacrificed to an idol, which Paul understood was a meaningless distinction anyway because idols are not gods so the meat was sacrificed to nothing.  It was more important to maintain peace and love within the church than for Paul to eat meat.

Is the Confederate flag a symbol of hatred and oppression or a symbol of Southern pride?  It doesn’t matter.  Our response should be the same.  If it is a symbol of hate, then obviously we should stop displaying it rather than align ourselves with hatred of our fellow man.  And we know that most people do interpret it as a symbol of hate.  But is it merely a benign symbol of Southern pride?  If so, then we must recognize that it is benign to us and powerful to hurt others.  It hurts our brothers and sisters.  So rather than give offense, we ought to be willing to give up this symbol.  For the sake of the gospel, let us sacrifice our pride.

I may find you not as I wish

2 Corinthians 12:20-21

For I fear that perhaps when I come I may find you not as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish—that perhaps there may be quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder.  I fear that when I come again my God may humble me before you, and I may have to mourn over many of those who sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, sexual immorality, and sensuality that they have practiced.

This small selection from today’s epistle speaks to a concern that has occupied a great deal of my mind lately.  Certainly there is much that we could go into, such as what Paul meant when he said the church at Corinth may find him not as they wish (he’s just been responding to some apparent slander), but what I am most interested in today is Paul’s fear of unrepentance in the Corinthian church.

The call we all received was to repent and believe the gospel.  Sort of.  Often we were called to believe the gospel, then eventually we heard something about repentance.  Or maybe we never heard about repentance, but we got a lot of judgment from church members because we weren’t living in a godly way.  Or maybe we heard repentance shouted from the pulpit every week, but they never quite got to the “believe the gospel” part.  Even then, repentance was a pretty nebulous concept for a lot of us.  So this morning I want to spend some time with repentance.

My childish idea of repentance was more or less being sorry that I was bad and trying to not be so bad anymore.  It was essentially “apologize and quit being naughty.”  That isn’t a terrible way for a child to think of repentance, but it isn’t sufficient for an adult.  Particularly since the naughtiness was never discussed in detail, apart from a few hot button issues.

A more grown up definition of repentance (which, I will happily admit, I did learn from pastors in church) is “turning away” from sin.  It is leaving behind the things you did when you were a sinner and not coming back to them.  As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.  Repentance is recognizing the vomit and not returning to it.  Repentance is not confession, which only deals with admitting our sin and, depending on our tradition, possibly receiving absolution or assurance of forgiveness or a slap on the wrist or a pat on the head.  It is the part that comes after we confess our sin, when we resolve not to return.  “Go, and sin no more.”  But then what?

I often had the idea of turning away from sin mentioned to me.  Sometimes that was even coupled with turning toward God, but not always.  When it was, turning toward God was left just as vague as the turning away from sin.  So I found myself as a child and young man turning away from a looming shadowy nightmare, wherein dwelt the monsters of premarital sex, drunken parties, swearing, lying, and all their unnamed companions and turning toward a distant shadowy emptiness, wherein were the beacons of church attendance and a daily quiet time and nothing else.

I’m reminded now of the story Jesus told of the unclean spirit cast out of the house; the house is swept clean and the unclean spirit goes and gets seven of his friends and comes back to the house, so the final condition of the man is worse than the first.  A few years ago a priest made this passage finally make sense to me by coupling it with this very idea.  That is, it is not sufficient simply to get rid of the bad thing; you must also fill up the space with something good.  If the house is swept clean, the unclean spirits can return; if someone else moves into the house, there’s no room for them.  In this case we’re talking about the Holy Spirit filling a person, but there’s a visible side to the filling of the Holy Spirit as well, and a way that we consciously join in his work.

The key here is the idea that we must not only turn away from sin, but that we must turn toward God.  Put another way, to turn off of the path of sin and onto the path of righteousness.  But sin is not just a churning pot of evil and righteousness is not just a distant radiance of goodness.  There are concrete things that are called sin and concrete things called righteousness.  We quit doing the former and start doing the latter.  We don’t simply quit doing the former, or the former will return bigger and badder than ever.  If we think of it in terms of the road, where one road is the road of sin and the other the road of righteousness, then stopping sinning is stopping on the road of sin.  We may not be walking down the path anymore, but we’re still on it.  The next step we take, once we take a step, will still be on the road of sin.  Yes, I know, the analogy is imperfect as all are.  But the point remains accurate enough for rhetoric.

So, what things should we turn away from and what things should we turn toward?  If the problem for me growing up was that sin wasn’t very clearly defined and righteousness was barely mentioned, then what can I offer to clarify matters?  Fortunately, scripture gives us a lot of help.  We can start with the 600 plus laws of Torah.  They paint a great picture of the heart of God, the acts of righteousness that he loves and the sin that he abhors.  But there’s a lot to wade through and often we Christians can get so bogged down in the food laws and the sacrifices that we miss everything else.  But we’re in luck, because most of the New Testament was spent explaining the Old Testament.  It was also written in forms intended to be copied and given to everyone so that even those Gentiles who don’t know anything about God can follow him rightly.  So we have teachings in short, compact forms, often with explanations.

Much of Jesus teaching was this way.  You want a primer in righteousness?  Check out the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).  I’ve occasionally talked about this being Jesus’ dissertation on Torah.  It is often presented in a way that makes it sound like Jesus was simply telling people that the Law was not sufficient and that God actually demanded an even higher standard of righteousness than the Jews thought.  A righteousness, mind you, that man can never fulfill, so God became man to fulfill it for us and give us the credit for it, so don’t really worry about doing any of this stuff.  But what if Jesus was actually giving us a guide to how we should live?  What if he really did want us to love our neighbors and our enemies, to accept persecution, to turn away from lust and hatred?  Guess what, he did.  It’s a high standard.  (We don’t have to do it perfectly because we don’t earn our salvation by our good works.  There is forgiveness from God, as there always has been, when we transgress the law.  But it’s still the standard.  It’s how God expects us to be trying to live, even when we fail.)

Okay, so Jesus teaching is great, but it’s still a lot of teaching.  The laws of Torah are hard to chew, the teaching of Jesus is almost too rich, so where can we turn for some simple guidance about how we ought to live in pursuit of righteousness and repentance from sin?  We’re in luck, brothers, because St. Paul was apparently the forerunner of BuzzFeed.  He loved lists.  His letters are full of lists of righteous acts and unrighteous acts, just to make sure we know what he’s talking about when he gives instruction.  So let’s look at some of his lists, since today’s selection includes one.  (Number 4 will make your jaw drop off of your face.)

Unrighteous acts according to 2 Cor 12:20-21: quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, disorder, impurity, sexual immorality, and sensuality.

These are all things to turn away from, obviously.  He doesn’t give us a list of righteous acts here because the selection is only two verses, but there are plenty of lists elsewhere.  And with a little thought, any of these things can be inverted to show the virtue that ought to be pursued.  Most of these are covered under peace, contentment, encouragement, and chastity.

Taking a step away from the passage, having been given the guideline of how to think of walking with God, I want to examine myself.  What sins do I pursue?  What do I continuously return to?  What will I say that I have repented of when in fact I have not repented but only been sorry for it?  I am not going to list them.  For one thing, there are too many to list.  For another, only a fool bears his soul to the internet.  So instead I will walk through the tools of examination and offer some of the thoughts that occur to me while I do.

The first step is to consider the lists of unrighteous acts.  I can see many of these things in my life.  Rather than allowing myself to walk in these ways, I will strive to walk in their opposite virtues.  The second step for me is to consider my cultural context.  What have I learned from being an American that has seeped into my Christianity?

Our great cultural blinder, I believe, is the concept of the rights of the individual.  When we apply this concept to others, it may lead to mercy and charity.  These things are obviously good.  But when I apply individualism or individual rights to myself it will almost always lead me to sin.  It causes me to focus on what I receive and how I am treated.  It draws me away from loving my neighbor and even loving God, because I am hurt by how my neighbor treats me and I am angry that God has not given me the blessings that I desire most.  I take up a defensive position, ensuring that I will be taken care of and that no one will hurt me more than I allow them to.  Further, it causes me to reinterpret the virtues described in scripture and by the church in order to fit my perceived needs.

I am called to give to the poor, but if I give to the poor then I won’t be able to afford the television that I have a right to, or the food that I want to eat, or the house that will make my family comfortable.  I am called to chastity, but my sexuality is a part of who I am and it is oppressive to forbid me to express it, or I have a right to get married and have children, or I don’t need to be chaste because we really love each other.  I am called to love my enemies and pray for those who persecute me, but I will tell everyone about what my enemies are doing to me and protest loudly or even violently when the persecution is heavier than I believe is fair.  I am called to die to myself, but I won’t allow others to treat me as though I were dead.

I wonder if Jesus would have spoken differently had he become incarnate in America rather than Judea.  He spoke of taking up your cross, which was a way of telling us to accept suffering, shame, and abuse.  Perhaps he might have said “Unless you surrender your rights, you cannot be my disciple.”  That certainly carries the same connotations as crucifixion.

An issue that I have and that the American church seems to have is that we focus on sin without considering virtue.  What is worse, we focus on peripheral sins rather than root sins.  Given that it’s a hot issue these days, the one that comes to mind first for me is the category of “family” as we like to call it.  That is, who we can marry, who we can sleep with, and what we can do after we’ve slept with them.  (This covers divorce and remarriage, gay marriage, homosexual practice in general, and abortion.)  We take each of these issues as an individual topic, often unrelated to the others, and we make claims about what scripture teaches on each issue.  To be sure, scripture does make claims about each of these issues.  But we focus on these sins and on leading people away from these sins without gently and lovingly slapping them upside the head and telling them to be chaste.  Chastity is the virtue that is most closely linked to all of these.  But we get lost in our rights.  The right to marry who I want to, even if I’m currently married to someone else; the right to do with my body what I please.  And we are seldom told that we do not have any right to our bodies at all.

Touching on marriage a little more, and on the value of chastity, I would like to draw a parallel between Jesus and St. Paul.  When Jesus is asked about divorce, he tells the people that Moses allowed divorce because of the hardness of their hearts.  But in the beginning it was not meant to be that way.  Indeed, when his disciples respond that in this case it is better for a man not to marry at all, his response is essentially “Yeah, now you’re getting it.”  And when St. Paul teaches on marriage to the Corinthian church, he allows them to get married rather than burn with passion.  Marriage is a concession, not a commandment.  It is certainly not a right.  We can learn something valuable by considering marriage as a sacrament, and how priests work it out in the Catholic church.  The priests are married.  To God.  To his church.  So we all ought to be.  Should the Lord bless us with marriage to someone other than himself, then we ought to faithfully honor that call.  But marriage to another person is not a right and it is not something to be sought after or pursued, especially at the expense of our marriage to God.

But I am getting slightly off topic, as I am wont to do.  Consider it as an illustration rather than a digression.  The point is that we only look at virtue through our cultural lens.  Not simply through the lens of the American World, but also the lens of the American Church.  When something listed in scripture as a virtue does not fit into our scope of basic human rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.) we assume that it must not be a virtue and we find a way to alter the virtue to make it more acceptable to us.  Instead, we ought to consider the virtue then alter our expectations of life.  Remove the log from your eye, then you can see clearly how to remove the other logs from your eye.

Repentance, then, for me and for many of us, must first involve repenting of our Americanism.  We repent of Individualism, Capitalism, and Rationalism so that we can even begin to repent of the sins that spring from them.

But it is easy to get lost again and fall into the trap of individualism without realizing it.  American Protestantism, at least, is caught up with the idea of a “personal relationship with God.”  This is a good thing to have, even a vital thing.  But we sometimes lose focus on the important point that it is a relationship with God and emphasize the point that it is personal.  That is, it is between me and Jesus and has nothing to do with you.  You have no right to tell me that I’m sinning, because that’s between me and the Lord.  I can treat you badly without incurring guilt, because you aren’t involved in my relationship with God.

I suggest that we shift our description of true Christianity to “a personal and communal relationship with God.”  This focus informs everything I have failed to say up to this point about virtue.  We do not simply pursue God and righteousness in order that we might personally be saved.  We pursue them out of love for God and for our neighbor.  God loves my neighbor and I love God, so I must also love my neighbor.  How I treat my neighbor matters to God.  So in order to please God, I must treat my neighbor as he desires me to treat my neighbor.  And if my neighbor is a Christian, also loving his neighbor as himself, then we will support one another, building one another up in our faith, encouraging and not destroying one another.  My good works are not for me, they are for you.  I do not give to the poor so that I may have treasure in heaven, but so that my neighbor may eat and be satisfied.

Further, looking to the greatest commandment for the idea of community, I see a shared faith. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Often Christianity, or church, is little more than a Jesus club.  What we have in common is the same faith, and that unites us to one another.  We get together once or twice a week and celebrate the thing we love.  Then we go on our way and don’t mention it again until we get together the next week.  I call it a Jesus club, but the truth is that it is often even less than that.  If I join a club, be it for a sports team or a hobby or a TV show that I enjoy, odds are that it will be something that takes up a considerable amount of my intention.  I will force my love of that thing on other people without their consent given the slightest opportunity.  Given how much I love the show, I will be sad when the season ends and excited for the next season premiere and my sadness or excitement will bleed into the rest of what I do.  And when I get together with other members of my club, even outside of club meetings, odds are that we will spend a lot of time talking about it.  In Christianity, we often refuse even to speak of God or our faith outside the time specifically devoted to it.  Because it is (ahem, cultural blinder) impolite to talk about religion.  And my relationship with God is between me and him.

Obviously I love talking about religion.  I’m a church nerd.  And obviously I don’t think that God was only commanding that we talk about him when we get together.  But it is worth mentioning that a little more talking about God when we interact with one another would not be a bad thing.  Talk about God with other Christians (not just about theology or church history, but God himself) and see how the rest of the conversation or the time together takes on a new character.  It somehow sanctifies the time.  It invites God into the conversation and often changes how we interact with one another.

But even when we aren’t talking about religion, we carry Christ with us as a sign on our hands and frontlets between our eyes.  Often we get into a social setting and forget our Christianity altogether.  We get caught up with our selves.  We focus on our own enjoyment or how we are being treated without considering how we are treating our neighbors.  We expect people to adapt to us, to make us happy, to be careful of our rights.  Instead, we ought to be considering how we can die to ourselves and love our neighbors.

This seems like a far stretch from where I started.  But my point is this:  When we repent it is not simply acknowledging that we sin and trying to not sin so much anymore.  Repentance is a complete turning away from a life of sin and a complete turning toward a life of righteousness.  When we repent, we give up all that we were and all that we pursued beforehand.  We walk toward God, walking in virtue and cultivating virtue.  We love others, seeing that they and not we are the ones worthy of honor.  We die and are raised to an entirely new life.  Some talk about a call to radical repentance, which gives a false conception.  It implies that there is some other form of repentance.  As though Jesus would like us to radically repent, but is willing to accept moderate repentance.  But we were not called to get sick to ourselves, we were called to die.

St. Paul feared that he might return to Corinth and find that those who had professed to repent had not in fact repented.  Jesus also spoke of his return, asking “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on the earth?”  Will he find those who have died to themselves and pursued him and his righteousness, or will he mourn over our lack of repentance?

These questions are not meant to be manipulative.  I am not trying to produce an intense emotional reaction, which I will follow up with an altar call.  These are questions that I ask myself, and that are meant for serious self-examination.  Where do I still allow myself to sin, not out of weakness but out of rebellion?  Where do I find myself acting out sinful desire instead of slaying it with a sword of virtue?  Where do I insist that God and my neighbor love me while I refuse to love them?

May the Lord grant us wisdom and true repentance, that we may honor him and show forth his glory through the good works of faith that he has prepared for us to do.