by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Multnomah Bible College

Portland, Oregon

I want to begin by thanking Dr. Metzger for organizing this conference—I know my congregants, as well as my colleagues in ministry have been asking, “How do we bridge the cultural divide?”  It seems to be so great.  I myself have struggled with this talk.  In fact, I woke in the middle of the night on two separate occasions to find myself thinking about this speech, and unable to go back to sleep.  Each time I got up and wrote a speech, and then I tore up both of them.  This is my third attempt.

In a very real sense, I am one of you—I am a Christian, with an interesting faith journey.  I was raised Roman Catholic, but at the age of 12 or so, I found that I was having difficulty with some of the dogma of the Catholic Church, like transubstantiation and confession.  Also, the priest told me that I couldn’t read and interpret the Bible for myself.  So I decided I had to leave the church.  I guess I was a Protestant from the beginning.  The priest came to my home, then, to talk with me.  I remember that he sat on one end of the sofa, and I sat on the other, and he looked at me, and he said, “Marilyn Jane,” (you know, in the South we have those double names) he said, “Marilyn Jane, you are going to hell if you don’t return to the Catholic Church.”

So I asked him, “Father, do you believe that God knows everything?”

“Yes, my child,” he said.

“Then God would know that I don’t really believe, so even if I came back to the Church, it wouldn’t do me any good.”  And he left that day, feeling that another soul had slipped away.

Now my grandparents, with whom I was living, were Southern Baptists, and so I started attending church their church.  No sooner than I did, though, I was told that Catholics were not Christians and that unless I gave my life to Jesus on Baptist terms—yes, you guessed it—I was going to hell.

Well, I did accept Jesus as my savior, as they said, when I was fourteen.  I remember the night.  It was at a revival led by Angel Martinez, who was about the best looking man I had ever seen.  When he gave the altar call, I looked into his eyes, and I just went on down the aisle and put my hand in his.  “Yes, Angel, I’ve come home to Jesus.”

I remained a Southern Baptist as an adult, and my husband and I and our two young children attended a large Baptist church in Lexington, KY.  But then the marriage went bad.  I did everything I could to avoid getting a divorce, because that was the last thing I wanted to do—I talked with our pastor, we went to a series of counselors, I prayed about it—but finally I did decide to divorce.  I felt it was a Spirit-led decision.  But the Baptist church didn’t see it that way.  Our friends there deserted us.  And I was told that I could no longer teach the children.  I think I was considered a fallen woman.

I remember weeping in my therapist’s office one day, telling her how I had lost my whole social structure, telling her how lonely I was, and she said, “Why don’t you go over to the Unitarian Universalist Church?  There are lots of divorced people over there.”  I did go, and there were lots of divorced people, yes, but also lots of all kinds of people—the important thing is that I was accepted as I was, and I had a place where I was loved and nurtured, and could give my gifts.  I became a leader there—whereas in the Baptist Church, I couldn’t even become a Deacon, because I am a woman.

I also think the manner in which I was brought into the Unitarian Universalist church is significant.  The first time I went, it was not to church, but to a volleyball game on Friday night.  I was sitting there on the side-lines, not knowing anyone, too shy to jump up and take a spot when a game was over.  Finally someone reached a hand down to me and said, “Don’t you want to play?”  I said, “Yes,” and he pulled me up, up into the game and I was part of the group after that.  His name was Titus, and he was a black man.  I had been a Christian all my life, and I had never been in church with a black person.  What’s wrong with this picture?

I still consider myself a Christian—a Unitarian Universalist Christian:  Unitarian meaning “God is one,” and Universalist meaning “universal salvation, all are saved.”  (Note that we are not Unity church, nor are we the Unification church—we have Christian roots, having come out of the left wing of the Protestant Reformation.  Unitarians and Universalists, similar in theology, came together as one in 1961.)  The Christian faith itself could potentially be a huge unifying element in this country, where 85% of our people consider themselves Christian—in fact, we call ourselves “a Christian Nation.”  When I thought about what to say to you today, about what we have in common, I realized that we have Jesus in common.  I love Jesus, and you love Jesus. 

But the question I want to put before us today is, “Who is this Jesus we profess to follow?”  In order to prepare for this talk, I went back through the gospels, just to refresh my memory, and this is what I found:

Jesus said over and over and over again—love is the answer, love is the way.  Time after time the scribes and Pharisees tried to trap him into violating the law, because they were afraid of his power—his power coming from God, whereas they had only the authority of their outdated rules and their position as religious leaders.  And Jesus kept saying, “Your rules are worthless, the only law is the law of love.”  You know the scripture.  These religious authorities were watching to see if Jesus healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath.  And Jesus said to them, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil?  Is it lawful to save a life?”  And then the scripture says (Mark, Ch. 3):  “He looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts.”

Again, in Matthew, Ch. 5, we read the words of Jesus:  “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you, turn the other cheek—love your enemies, bless them that curse you”—whoa, that’s the radical message of Jesus!  LOVE TRUMPS EVERY LAW, EVERY RULE—YOU MEASURE EVERYTHING BYTHE PRINCIPLE OF LOVE—don’t look in the scripture, don’t go by your traditions, throw your rationalizations out the window—go straight to the heart—what does your heart say, what does love demand?  That’s the Jesus I see in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Jesus turns everything upside down—all our normal expectations.  For example, we believe that those who work hard can expect to be prosperous—right? That may be a cultural ethic in the U.S., but that’s not what Jesus said.  He said, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and dust doth corrupt . . . .  But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  (Matthew, Ch. 6)

The rich young ruler comes to Jesus and asks, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” (Matthew, Ch. 19) Jesus says, keep the commandments.  He says, well I’ve done that.  Well, only one thing more, says Jesus—sell all you have and give the money to the poor.  Now I don’t believe Jesus meant that literally—but I do believe that he was telling this fellow that following the rules was not enough—you have to give yourself away—don’t be coming here preoccupied with your own salvation—don’t you get it?  It’s not about you, Jesus is saying, it’s about others.

That emphasis couldn’t be clearer than it is in Matthew 25, when Jesus says, essentially, “When you die, there’s going to be a test.”  Did you feed the hungry?  Did you shelter the stranger?  Did you take care of the sick, and visit those in prison?

So I’m reading the scripture, and I’m thinking, “We’re a Christian nation?  I don’t think so!”  Nearly 18% of American children lived in poverty last year.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003—and Oregon is one of the states with the most hunger.  We are the most violent of the developed countries in the world, with a murder rate 4 or 5 times that of countries in Europe.  We have 6 or 7 times as many of our citizens in prison.  We’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens—mostly in states that are Christian strongholds.  Not to mention our militarism—which most recently has cost tens of thousands of Iraqi and now 2,000 American lives.  A Christian nation?  I think not, by these measures.  I believe Jesus said: “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword. (Matt. 26:52)

So with the situation in this country being what it is, in terms of poverty, hunger, racism, and violence, what do I see Christians in the popular culture overwhelmingly focusing on?  The End-Times.  And churches preaching the gospel of prosperity—how you can get yours.  Churches calling people to be better consumers, to improve themselves, to get better self-esteem.  Jesus’ radical message focused on others, not on ourselves.  Politically, the focus for Christians is on two sexual issues, issues to do with the body: abortion and homosexuality—women, this is what you must do with your body, never mind the circumstances; gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transgendered folks, there is only one way to love, and it’s our way—what do you think Jesus would say about that? What would the law of love call us to do?  If nothing, Jesus was inclusive.  He ate with tax collectors, the very people who were persecuting his people.  He was friendly with prostitutes.

I’ve got to tell you that I had a lot of pain to find when I arrived here in Portland fourteen years ago and saw that Christians were leading the assault against the civil rights of gays and lesbians, of whom I have many in my church.  Sometimes they would come through the line after a sermon and weep in my arms with fear, trying to live in that atmosphere of hate.  And of course so much violence was being done then and still is done now to gay men, in particular.  I think of Matthew Shepherd there in Laramie, Wyoming, strung up on a fence and left to die, a victim of this kind of hate.  There are no finer people in my church than my gay and lesbian folks—and when they hurt, I hurt.  I hurt.

It is distressing to me as well that Christians don’t seem so concerned about policies that further reward the very rich and further impoverish the poor.  Oh, a little charity here and there is a good thing—a soup kitchen is good—but how about asking why there are so many hungry people—right here in Multnomah County?  What about worrying less about individual sin and working against systemic evil?  I see Christians—and this is in my denomination as well as in others—being comfortable with charity, but not so comfortable with justice.  What did the prophet say?  “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5)

So, how to bridge this cultural divide?  I think it is a cultural divide and not truly a religious one—there would be a lot more unity if those of us who count ourselves as Christian would actually attempt to follow Jesus.  We need to bring our theology in line with what the scripture says, not what would be easy or what would feel good for us.  If our theology pulls us away from Jesus’ radical message about helping the poor and the weak and the disenfranchised, then we need to question our theology.  The dominant theologies of Christianity today—I have to say, the exception is the Black church—don’t have much to do with the Jesus of the scriptures.

As people who claim to follow Jesus, we need to ask ourselves, the single question that Jesus asked folks over and over again, “What does LOVE demand of us?”  Not what does our pastor say.  Not what do our political leaders say.  Not what do the neighbors think.  Just that one question:  “What does LOVE demand of us?”  If we try to answer that question together, as human beings, if we really asked ourselves, “What would Jesus do?” we might not agree on everything, but perhaps we will begin to tear down the golden calves we have erected—our cultural idols to prosperity, to American domination, to violence, and to the rule-making and its self-righteousness that keeps us separate and apart from our sisters and brothers.  We need one another, and the world needs Christians who truly wish to follow Jesus, however imperfectly we may do it—and I confess I do it very imperfectly—but we need to truly try to follow this revolutionary and his radical rule of love.

Francis David was one of our earliest theologians and a martyr to our Unitarian faith.  He said, “We need not think alike to love alike,” and I hope we can go forward together in that spirit.