Today we continue our look at things you can learn in church in just one day. The day in question was last Sunday, October 27th. In our last post we talked about Sunday School. We move to worship in this post.
The 27th was Reformation Sunday, the day when we honor the folks who have reformed our church throughout the ages. In Lutheran churches this is normally accompanied by selections from Martin Luther and his grand, old German hymns plus some cheerleading for being Lutheran. This year we decided to mix it up a little bit, talking instead about the theological reforms gifted to us from the Latin American church of the 20th century. Not only was this a different flavor, it allowed us to define our church as still reforming, in the growth process instead of the end-product of it.
Obviously it would be impossible to cover multiple centuries of Latin American development in a single sermon (or blog post). Instead we took a broad sweep across history that led to a couple of key theological inspirations in the 1940's and 1950's.
Latin America contained some of the world's oldest cultures...amazing, brutal, heirs to all the good and ill of humanity. When explorers from Spanish-speaking nations discovered and then colonized Latin America they ran into, conquered, and transformed these indigenous cultures. As was true of most European-indigenous culture clashes, two themes ended up dominating:
1. Those native folks were sitting on top of tons of natural resources.
2. The natives had not heard of Jesus Christ or his Gospel.
In the colonization environment, these two themes intertwined. Missionaries and "civilized" folks brought religious and cultural reform to the indigenous people, changing their society. Establishing a European religious and cultural framework paved the way for European access to the economic resources of the region.
We can debate all day whether such missionary impulses were right or wrong, helpful or destructive. No matter what we decide, it still happened. The end result of this religious-societal-economic chemistry was a strong strain of Catholicism throughout Latin America, Catholicism which tended to value authority and upholding the status quo, including that dominant (and in some ways exploitative) economic and social framework.
In the mid-20th century several theologians re-examined the assumptions under which their church had operated for centuries. Latin America continued to be heavily influenced by church authority and the will of a few privileged folks over and against the poor masses who labored for them. In most circles the authority of the church and will of the economically privileged were assumed to be congruent, if not exactly the same. The wealthy promoted and supported the church. The church upheld the system that made gathering such wealth easy. The relationship was cozy. Few outside of it had the means or status to cry against it. What right or standing would a poor, uneducated person have to challenge the church?
In response to this situation a courageous group of theologians bucked the trend. Their collective movement would come to be known as "Liberation Theology". As with the history, we can only hope to give an oversimplified summary here, but basically Liberation Theology asserted that God did not exist to make us comfortable in the world, but to set us free from everything that oppresses us. God's work does not confirm us as much as it transforms us from death into life.
This transformation centers around the notion of justice. The world judges by certain criteria. Rich and powerful folks are favored, poor folks are despised. God loves all his children, rich or poor. God does not look on the imbalance between powerful and oppressed folks and smile. Rather he moves to correct it, lifting up his children who have been short changed and calling down the ones who have benefited by oppressing others. Folks looked upon wealthy men and a correspondingly wealthy church and said, "God favors them!" These theologians argued that God was actually working harder for the folks who had been left out in the cold by this system. If you wanted to see Jesus at work, you needed to pay less attention to the gold and more attention to the folks crying out for help and the folks without hope.
In the traditional system, church membership meant going along with the flow. The church existed, in part, to support the dominant culture which in turn would support it. The goal of a good church-goer was to make as few waves as possible. Political and economic concerns had little to do with faith. Liberation Theology argued that the church should not confirm inequity, but fight it. Faith was only lip service unless it also resulted in working for justice and true peace in the world. Faith mandated political and economic action. If you saw someone suffering you were supposed to approach them and try to fix the inequity...not because those people were inherently entitled but because that's where God was at work and that's what he was doing.
A necessary extension of this theology: a church is not validated just by existing as an institution. Its spirit is shown most truly by the work it does in the world. No longer is something right just because it benefits the church. Rather the church itself serves a greater right, the will and word of Our Lord.
Practicality mandated that the people the church should pay most attention to (and respect) were the people who gave the most to it...allowed it to exist. This ended up being the rich. More money equals more influence in the church and being credited with a closer connection to God. Liberation Theology stood this on its ear. It claimed that if we wanted to find God most clearly at work, we shouldn't look towards the people who seemed most blessed by the world's standards. Rather we should seek out those who needed God most...by definition those who were doing without. Poverty was not holier than wealth, but if a father had six children doing quite well and one going hungry, he was going to devote his energy to feeding the hungry one before he feasted at the table of the other six.
No theology gives a complete picture of God, but Latin American Liberation Theology exposed many practical weaknesses in the church tradition. The theologians who risked their reputation, standing, and in some cases their lives to bring it to us gave us a great gift...shaking us out of our complacency and our complicit alliance with the ways of the world that appeared to benefit us. They helped us to see that in the name of serving God and preserving his church, we were actually steering farther and farther away from him.
We don't have to look far to see how our own churches and the dominant American culture became aligned whether or not that was in accordance with God's teachings. We, too, suffer the temptation to go along in order to benefit ourselves. We find it inconvenient to immerse ourselves in, and be led by the needs of, the poor and oppressed instead of staying comfortably in the world of the privileged. We'd rather have a church where everybody gets along, where folks don't make waves, where we don't have to fight (or do) much out in the world, and where "peace" is defined as the absence of talk about justice instead of the end result of fighting for it. We're good with the church as long as it doesn't disturb the rest of our life much.
Liberation Theology has a message for us as well. The things we are trying to embrace and preserve end up empty. God is headed in another direction than we instinctively want to go. Even today, half a century later, it remains a wake-up call for the church of the Reformation...a church which hates to contemplate that it might still be reforming. How have we worked for justice? Have we taken a stand for those outcast, impoverished, slighted and disadvantaged? If not, are we really doing the work of the Lord who ate with sinners or are we doing our own work and appending God's name to it in order to justify ourselves?
Another thing to think about and learn from just one day in church!
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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