A Birthday Tribute to Ms. Lena Horne

 

Written by Dan McDonald

            It surely is a reflection of America’s history of racial issues that one thinks of Miss Lena Calhoun Horne as having been a black singer rather than simply being recognized as an American treasure.  Perhaps she is more American than almost any of us.  Her ancestry included European-Americans, African-Americans, and Native Americans.  That makes her about as American as anyone could ever be.  She was likely, or at least reportedly, a descendant of Senator and Vice-President John Calhoun.  She lived a long life, born June 30, 1917 and she passed away on May 9, 2010.  It was a life that spanned a history of change in the way minority races were treated in the United States.  She, like Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and numerous veterans of American wars during her life helped pave the way to America’s recognition that no race should be treated as separate or second class.  Brown v. Board of Education took place after the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a major league baseball contract, and after MGM signed Ms. Lena Horne to a movie contract.  She was not the first black woman to sign a contract with MGM, but she had the opportunity to be the second black woman signed to a major studio and surely the first to not be forgotten by most Americans.  Nina Mae McKinney signed a contract with MGM in 1929, but she never became a star that was remembered by a generation.  Lena Horne became known for her beauty, grace, and talent.  It took that sort of life image to pave the way for a society that hopefully is closer to being a society of equals than we were in the past.  Lena Horne saw the racial divide, stood up to it when she could, and as a singer and performer helped win Americans over to realizing that no race of Americans should be treated as second class citizens.

            There is reason to believe that the racial situation in America has improved since Lena Horne was born.  Her movie career suffered even as she became something of a household name in America after her contract with MGM.  MGM would only give her roles that were not significantly involved in the plot of the movies.  The reason was that several Southern states had segregation laws so strict that no black actor or actress could be seen in a movie for white movie-goers.  So MGM cast Lena Horne in filler spots that could be edited out of the movies when shown in those southern states.  I think few of us who are European-Americans quite understand what it has meant to be from a minority group and especially to be black American in the United States.  Even if a good amount of progress has been made in the last sixty or seventy years, one can understand with such a history shaping generations of African-Americans how even if progress has been made, scars exist which will be around for at least another generation or two.

            Lena Horne attributed a good deal of her success in singing to composer Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn for his role in helping develop her singing talent.  She described Strayhorn’s influence to Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hadju:  “I wasn’t born a singer.  I had to learn a lot.  Billy rehearsed me.  He stretched me vocally.”  Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and she said; “He taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”  She remarked of Strayhorn that he was the only man she ever really loved but he wasn’t interested in her sexually as he was openly gay.  I write this as one who believes in a traditional Christian understanding that homosexuality is an improper use of sexuality.  Nonetheless, most traditional Christians I know will confess if honest that there is something in virtually every one of us regarding our sexuality, behavior, and attitude that needs continued redemption.  It will likely become more and more the case that most of us will have openly gay friends as the lifestyle becomes accepted by more and more Americans.  It will surely be an issue for years to come, but it will likely be the case in the foreseeable future that especially traditional Christians will need to make clearer than ever before our distinction between how we regard the sin and the sinner.  If we believe it is a sin we must be honest in saying that.  Nevertheless, we have no reason in the Gospel to be mean spirited or more unforgiving towards this sin than any other sin.  This is something we traditionalists will have to consider and pray about as we meet people living this lifestyle in the present and future.  We should recognize that we are to present the love of Christ to every person and the rest is between God and the person to whom we are called to show love in Christ.  We may even find it is quite refreshing not to have to determine anything but to know God's love in Christ and to live in that love towards others.

            Lena Horne probably did not at first choose to be a spokeswoman for black causes, but from the beginning of her movie career she accepted the responsibility of seeing her role in America’s movie industry as important for the race she was part of that was treated so often as second class.  She made it known to MGM that she would not play the role of a maid or a servant as she wanted to see her role represent something more than a servant or maid.  While playing the role of a maid or servant is something that can be done with great dignity, Ms. Horne realized that in 1942 most of Americans needed to see blacks as something other than simply servants.  She played the role that had brought her to Hollywood, the role of a singer and performer.  Her father had played a role in shaping Lena Horne’s decision to make it clear that she would not accept a servant’s role.  Her father had said, “I can get a maid for my daughter, she doesn’t need to play a maid in movies.”

            Her contract with MGM began in 1942.  The United States was at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan.  Both white and black Americans were serving in the war, but their units were segregated.  Ms. Horne served the war effort by singing and dancing for Black troops.  She discovered that USO performers performed before segregated audiences.  Whites and black soldiers were not allowed to go to the same USO performances.  She protested the arrangement.  For those who think segregation was not all that bad, there were incidents in her performing at USO events that brought out how badly blacks were treated through segregation.  She performed at times in audiences that included blacks and German prisoners of war.  In those instances the German prisoners were given front row seats while the black American soldiers were forced to sit in back rows.  Ms. Horne came down from the stage to sing in those instances and walked to the front row of the American black soldiers and sang from there rather than the stage.

            In the 1950’s Lena Horne’s movie career went on hiatus as she was listed as being influenced by the Communists.  She was certainly to the left on the political spectrum, but left wing politics had an immense appeal to people who had not yet been treated as equals to white America.  She worked with Paul Robeson on some Civil Rights works, so there is little reason not to suspect her of being leftist, but also no good reason for believing that she was a threat to the nation.  Robeson, a former All-American football player at Rutgers and class valedictorian at Rutgers held openly to Communist beliefs.  But it was not uncommon for Communists and non-Communists to work together in the Civil Rights movement.  There was common cause for equality whether one believed that equality meant redistribution of wealth or merely equality under the law.  Both issues needed addressed in 1950 and there was a lot of room for common cause in such instances.

            With her Hollywood career mostly ended, Horne returned to nightclubs, Broadway, and also many television appearances as she continued to perform almost her entire life.  In the 1960’s she was active in the Civil Rights movement.  She went in support of Civil Rights in the march on Washington, and she appeared with Medgar Evers the weekend before his assassination.  There had been a time when she worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to strengthen the laws against lynching.  During her life from 1917 to 2010 she went from having her film appearances edited out of states with segregation laws to seeing a black president elected.

            I think one of the most eloquent summaries of Lena Horne’s life was made by Lena Horne as an eighty year old woman looking back on her life and how she had reached a place where she had a solid self-identity as she turned 80.  She said:  “My identity is very clear to me now.  I am a black woman.  I’m free.  I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’  I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody;   I don’t have to be a first to anybody.  I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become.  I’m me and I’m like nobody else.”  Somehow that seems to me like it should be the way we expect people to see themselves.  Until that is the reality for how we look at all persons, then I think to that degree we have remaining problems regarding race and other issues that so easily divide us.

            It is hard to select a signature song for Lena Horne, but if there is one it would be the one she sang in a 1943 movie, “Stormy Weather.”  You can view her performance on this link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCG3kJtQBKo

            I would encourage anyone interested in considering the life of Lena Horne more than I have written to watch the following two brief You Tube videos covering Lena Horne’s life.  They will include clips from her singing and performing career.  Both are less than ten minutes long, a 2 part look at her life.  I count her as a true American treasure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYE8fp8kHdw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiIZfbLdmWY

I would like to credit the two following sources for the information contained in this article:

Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Horne

New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/arts/music/10horne.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

 

Addition to original article presented August 25, 2013

I have realized since writing this article that some of my view of relief that we have made progress in this part of American culture, is a white person's fantasy that with a few pieces of legislation we swept the problem away.  I knew better than that when I wrote the article, but my desire to be positive led me to address the issue as if it were virtually solved in the past generation.  I present this video to show something of the remaining work needing done.

http://www.upworthy.com/one-easy-thing-all-white-people-could-do-that-would-make-the-world-a-better-place-5?g=3

 

 

Will we go to war once more in the Middle East?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            St. James asked centuries ago, “From whence come wars and fighting among you?” (James 4:1)  His answer, to paraphrase him simply, is that we war with others, both nationally and individually because of our covetousness and lusts.  When it comes to nations especially and to individuals on a limited basis one might do well to remember that St. Paul viewed covetousness as idolatry.  I am not a pacifist in the sense that I believe all wars are wrong.  But I fear that Americans and especially Conservatives tend to support war far more easily than did the early church fathers or the most blameless of the men and women whom we have come to recognize as living some of the most stellar of Christian lives throughout history.  We want to believe our national leaders when they say war is necessary.  We live in a strange time when more and more we doubt the integrity of our leaders, yet feel we must give them the benefit of the doubt when they announce that some foreign leader in our target site has crossed the line and used weapons of mass destruction against their opponents.  What will our tax dollars and inflationary fiat money and all the cash we can borrow from China and our Persian Gulf “allies” serve to accomplish in the next war?  I present the following understanding of the Middle East as a theory.  Perhaps others can prove my suspicions to be foolish.  I would even like to think so.  But I present what makes sense to me.  When nations rush to war ignore the given reasons for going to war and seek out what seems like the crass reason one would go to war if all the good reasons did not explain the rush to war.

            The Middle East is a rather complex area and our foreign policy in the Middle East is also complicated.  Reasons for wars are generally like icebergs in the ocean.  There are the announced reasons given to rally men and women around the flag and to convince parents and young people that the deaths of a few good warriors in a war is for a good cause and one should be proud of their child either for dying in battle or for killing in battle.  Parents aren’t typically proud of their children getting killed by someone in peacetime, nor are they proud when their child kills someone in peacetime.  But let the government wave the flag and suddenly it is a patriotic duty for your children to either kill someone or die when someone else kills him.  I suppose that there are few more irrational things done so often as to rally around the flag when someone says “let’s go to war.”  It is an insane dreamer that imagines that one day a government will call its citizenry to war and the people will say (I shan’t say it, but you can put in your own feelings if you think just once it would be nice for a government to issue a call to war and the people to respond with a response of peace.  Deep down we are sinners and we have these secret wishes to kill people with whom we disagree, so when the government says we must go to war, we almost always will for we have no will but to be led to slaughter on our own way to slaughter.

            There are probably two central focuses on American and also European foreign policy in the Middle East.  Like the iceberg, one focal point is well known, but the other is something we hardly ever speak of.  The first focal point of American foreign policy is that we are allies of Israel.  Whether it is because our Christian culture has its roots in Judaism, or Evangelical eschatology, or because the Jewish vote is important in close elections, support of Israel is pretty much a given in American Middle East policy.  But I really don’t believe that is what chiefly drives our foreign policy in the Middle East.

            It is the hidden alliance we have in the Middle East that perhaps more often drives our foreign policy than the Israel lobby.  There have been two struggles for Middle Eastern control in recent decades.  There has been the Muslim v. Jewish struggle with Middle Eastern Christians caught in the middle, but there has also been a struggle within Islam between the Sunni majority and the Shiite minority.  Worldwide the Shiite portion of Islam is a footnote in the population of Islam, but within the Middle East it is a majority of the people in some regions of the Middle East.  While there have been times when the two sects of Islam lived peacefully with one another, there have also been troubled times when great struggles between the two sects of Islam have fought for control of the region.  The overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Islamic clerics resulted in the establishment of a powerful Shiite regime in the Middle East.  This resulted in Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran.  Iraq’s leadership was Sunni, but the majority of Iraqi citizens under Saddam’s rule were Shiite.  Saddam Hussein feared that Iranian influence would endanger his grip in the Shiite regions of eastern Iraq, in which Iraq had the largest portion of its oilfields.  Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran resulted in heavy casualties for both nations but no ultimate winner.  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the United States under the first George Bush refused to topple Saddam Hussein.  We did not do so, visibly because that was not our mandate by the United Nations.  But invisibly, I suspect the reason was that we feared a Shiite dominated Iraq would tilt the balance of power from Sunni run governments to Shiite dominated governments.  That would be extremely significant.

            Why would it be so significant for Americans if the Shiites gained an upper hand in the Middle Eastern Islamic world instead of the Sunni governments in the Middle East?  That leads us to the second alliance America has in the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia is ruled by the House of Saud.  The Saud family is Wahhabi, which is a fundamentalist sect within Sunni Islam.  The alliance between the nations of Western Europe and North America and Saudi Arabia has had its rough moments but has been a fixture of Middle Eastern policy since the end of World War II.  When President Richard Nixon took the American dollar off the gold standard, it was the Saudi led OPEC oil cartel that solidified the dollar by agreeing to sell OPEC’s oil only in US dollars.  When oil prices rose too high for Western nations to support the OPEC oil cartel, Saudi Arabia could be counted on to bring oil to the market to disrupt the goal of hardliners that wanted to see Middle Eastern oil used more to develop Middle Eastern infrastructure and industry.  Hardline Islamists saw the House of Saud as little more than a vassal of Western powers.  American foreign policy is more easily traceable to making decisions based on what is good for the House of Saud than what is good for Israel.  The American leadership of NATO and Western Europe depends on its ability to keep oil flowing from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East to Europe.

            One can follow America’s wars and will see that in each instance care was taken not to injure Saudi interests, even as Saudi actions generally were helpful to Western Europe and the United States.  Following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, America tended to be friendlier with Saddam Hussein.  But Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait led to concern within the House of Saud.  It was one thing for Hussein to offer resistance to a powerful Iran, but quite another to vie for Sunni leadership with Saudi Arabia.  The invasion of Kuwait resulted in chastisement but not destruction of Saddam Hussein.  It all makes sense if Western Europe, the United States, and the House of Saud agreed that a chastened pliable Saddam would be more in their interests than a Shiite dominated Iraq.  After 9-11 Saddam’s rule began to be viewed as no longer tenable.  There were concerns that Hussein had supported some of the factions resisting Israel.  But the final breaking point came when it was determined that Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.  It has been noted that Saddam’s greater concern in seeming to claim at times that he had weapons of mass destruction was its uneasy border with Iran.  He wanted to appear more powerful than he actually was because of Iran.  But probably the real WMD that shook American willingness to support Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s determination to sell oil directly in exchange for the Euro.  If OPEC’s selling of oil in American dollars was threatened, then the fear of the American dollar going into free-fall would likely have horrendous ramifications on the American dollar and the American economy.  Saddam Hussein's decision not to sell oil in dollars was a "weapon of monetary destruction."  It was determined that Saudi Arabia’s chief competitor for power within the Sunni portion of the Middle East was no longer supportable.  But there was a cost to toppling Saddam Hussein.  Iraq would undoubtedly come to be governed by its Shiite majority, and would tilt towards Iran in critical situations.  Almost immediately even as the United States fought a war helping Shiites to free themselves in Iraq, American foreign policy began to target Iran as the next enemy with which we would have to deal.  Iran’s only real ally in the Arab Middle East is Syria.  Syria is led by the Assad family which has offered Syria religious freedom and political oppression.  The Assad family is neither Sunni nor Shiite, but Alawi.  The Alawi movement has some roots in Shiite Islam but has been viewed heretical by both the Shia and Sunni movements.  Nevertheless the Assad family cultivated support in all the people groups under their rule by allowing freedom for most all the groups in Syria to worship.  But politically a minority heretical movement would not fare well if Syria were in the hands of its Sunni majority.  So the Assad family was extremely recessive politically even though it was quite benevolent to all worship groups when judged by Middle Eastern standards.

            So what is the reason for the rattling of sabers in the Middle East?  Is it because Assad is a bad guy?  Is it because the Sunni rebels, largely supportive of Al-Qaeda are such good guys?  Or is it because the key to American foreign policy is to support and maintain support of the House of Saud?  This is so because in times of crisis, the House of Saud can be counted on to help the Western world, and has been willing to do so for sixty years.  The House of Saud, perhaps more than any other Middle Eastern nation feels threatened by the growth of Shiite power in the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia is a majority Sunni nation, but it fears Shiite power because one part of Saudi Arabia has a Shiite majority.  That portion in Saudi Arabia with a Shiite majority is the Eastern regions of Saudi Arabia where Saudi Arabia’s most productive oilfields exist.  That is why the struggle between the Shiites and the Sunni threatens the one crucial nation that seems to explain everything we do in the Middle East even if the House of Saud is never mentioned as the reason for what we are doing in the Middle East.

            Israel is a spiritual and cultural connection to the Western world.  If our political leaders wish to motivate us to warfare we will hear of how Israel is affected.  But if you wish to understand our foreign policy in the Middle East view the Middle East as an iceberg with Israel the small pointed nation sitting above the waterline and the House of Saud as the large mass beneath the water level.  There is one ally always seen and always spoken of, and another hardly ever seen and hardly ever discussed.  It is the latter one for which we will likely go to war with our flags waving and hundreds of ministers urging us to support Israel.

The Cross where God shows us His Love

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            “Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man - - though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die.  But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  (Romans 5:7-8 RSV)

            One of the most unique movies I have ever seen was the movie “The Mill and the Cross”.  The movie focuses on Peter Bruegel explaining his 1564 painting, of the same title to a Dutch art collector, as they exchange perspectives on the brutal times in which they lived.  Bruegel explains his painting that shows the passion of Christ as if Christ were a Dutchman and he was being crucified in a Dutch setting, with literally hundreds of fellow Dutchmen as well as their Spanish oppressors around the passion scene.  Before one condemns Bruegel’s work of trying to contemporize Christ’s passion into a sixteenth century Dutch setting, we might pause for a moment, to see how St. Paul’s grammar in Romans 5:8 employs a curious feature.  St. Paul divides the sentence into present activity and a past event.  Christ died in the past, an event that is once and for all time.  But God employs that event to show us in forever present tense that God shows us his love now in this moment even to the end of the age and into the heavenly realms in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  Bruegel has the Biblical sense to know that because Christ died centuries ago, God was now showing his love Bruegel’s fellow Dutchmen in the death of Christ.  The minister proclaiming the Gospel to men and women of modern cultures whether they are in the modernistic West, in the developing southern cone, in an Asian setting has the ministry of showing God’s present tense love that is shown in the death of Christ for us while we were yet sinners.  My theology has to a large degree been shaped by the theology of the Reformation, but the Christian gospel must not become a gospel that tells people how they may enter a subculture that freezes life in the sixteenth century or any other century.  Nor is the goal to simply contemporize everything in modern dress.  Rather the goal is to show men and women in every generation, every cultural and subcultural setting that God is now showing his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.

            In “The Mill and the Cross” Bruegel makes a curious point about the sufferings and death of the Christ.  God mysteriously hid the effects of Christ’s death not in the ordinary way we think of one hiding some great treasure.  God hid Christ’s sufferings and death right in the middle of everything.  He placed Christ’s death in the middle of history and placed his death in the middle of witnesses, but so many of those who witnessed this death were oblivious to the true nature of Christ’s death because they were so engaged in their own activities and pursuits.  There were some that had become Christ’s enemies and actively pursued his death.  St. Paul wrote as someone who had once held similar sentiments.  He had been that sort of sinner until God showed him his love in the death of Christ.  Many others were like those of which the two disciples spoke on the road to Emmaus.  They told the stranger who had come next to them on the road of the commotion in Jerusalem for many had hoped that this Jesus was the Christ, the promised Messiah, but now he had been crucified and had died and apparently with him had died that hope.  Palm Sunday had not been a flash in the pan event.  Men and women really had come to believe that this one was the Christ, but this death of Christ how did it fit into such a hope?  God, says St. Paul, shows us his love in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.  He took upon himself the burden of our sins and paid the penalty.  I cannot escape that New Testament logic.  That is not the only thing that he did and this was not some Gnostic act of a loving Son of God trying to appease a vengeful and wrathful God the Father.  This was a Trinity in unity; a Father so loving the world that he gave his son, a son so loving the world that he would die in the place of sinners, and the Holy Spirit so devoted to the love of the world that he would descend and fill the church and be with its ministries to the end of the age that he might bring this one activity hidden in an ancient past into present tense in every time and place where the Gospel is preached and where the sacraments are carried out.

            St. Paul’s theology and that of the other New Testament’s Epistles was never meant to become a separate branch of Biblical studies.  Rather the New Testament epistles were meant to be authoritative commentaries teaching churches and Christians about the meaning of Christ’s life, teachings, death and resurrection.  The best way I think to understand what St. Paul is saying about God showing or demonstrating his love in the death of Christ for sinners is to see how the Gospel writers described Christ’s death in the midst of so many varied persons and how among those represented by so many various persons there were those whom even on the day Christ died came to realize that there was something unique about Christ and his death.

            Bruegel, in his painting showed Christ’s death in the midst of an entire village, along with a number of foreign soldiers brutally oppressing the people.  The scenes in the movie based on the painting are often brutal.  Bruegel’s painting tried to successfully capture in his sixteenth century Dutch setting the relationship between the lives of Dutch sinners hoping in Christ and that long ago scene around the cross of Jesus Christ as he suffered and died for us while we were yet sinners.  That original setting shown by the Gospel writers was one of darkness, literal darkness on the day that the sun seemed to be taken out of the sky as Christ was to die.  There was gloom and despair as the hopes of the disciples that this one was the Christ turned to the desolation of grief as Christ died.  Was this the end?  Had it all come to this nothingness?  But even in this day of darkness a handful of souls were being enlightened and instructed in an astonishing manner as if the first fruits of those who were discovering the truth about this death of Jesus of Nazareth.  They were not the expected recipients of such a discovery.  There was a Roman centurion, a thief on the cross, and seeds were planted in the consciences of men who had likely participated in manipulating the political scenery and the masses to put an end to a Christ they felt had gone too far.  There was a disciple lingering there who had been described by Jesus as a “son of thunder” whose desire to see God’s wrath upon Christ’s enemies showed that he did not yet understand Christ.  He lingered there at the cross and learned the lesson of that great day when God showed his love in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.

All of these stories of those around the cross of Christ are meant to be brought into our lives so that we see we too, even out of time and place, have lives taking place all around the cross where God shows his love toward us.  We too have our lives described in the scenery of the cross.  Perhaps we are discouraged for everything seems to have grown dark and if Christ is not being crucified in our time, his religion is being scorned, ridiculed, forsaken, and worse treated as if wholly irrelevant to modern life.  Perhaps we are the scorners who have decided this is a religion simply in the way of progress.  Perhaps we are those who are too busy in living out our lives on the way to the grave to think upon this scene where Jesus is dying for sinners.  We are the busy ones on the fringe ignoring the scene taking place on the hill outside of the city.  We are all there able to look and see upon the proclaimed death of Christ that God’s love is being shown to us.  Perhaps we will just walk on by as if that has nothing to do with our lives.  Many did just that on that first Good Friday so long ago.  But the writers of the four New Testament Gospels saw that some did not just walk by, but took notice and realized to differing degrees something unique in the death of Christ so that they understood that God was addressing mankind through this death of Christ.

            We can begin at the very top.  While N.T. Wright is sometimes controversial, he seems to me to be correct in his assessment that Christ came to establish the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven and that he actually succeeded because he was establishing a kingdom unlike any other kingdom or nation of men.  This was not the sort of kingdom imagined by so many of the Jews of Jesus’ day, nor was it even like the great nations that have had their influences felt in our own lives and passions.  It is sometimes difficult for men and women who are citizens of a nation they love to realize that the kingdom of God operates very differently from what any nation on earth can operate.  There is a great difference between the kingdom of Rome ruled by Caesar and represented in Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate; and the kingdom of God represented by Jesus Christ even on the day when Christ suffered under Pilate.  Rome imagined that it had a mission of bringing Roman peace and law to the world.  Great powers grow great imagining themselves having a divine mission, ministry, mandate, and manifest destiny.  If they do not imagine themselves to be a truly superior people they imagine themselves to be the possessors of a superior order.  Thy imagine that this gives them the right to conquer other people, to occupy more and more territories, and to grow their empires and global influence so that they might enlighten the rest of humankind.  Rome conquered nations to give them law.  Britain accepted the white man’s burden to take science as much as Christianity to a world devoid in British opinion of civilization.  America determined itself to be the guarantor of democracy, and gradually gave itself the right to intervene globally in the cause.  In every instance great powers regarded themselves as having a mission, ministry, and destiny to use power and influence to change the world.

            That is part of the Gospel story.  There were two contrasting lordships, one heading an Empire of this world and calling upon men to recognize the divinity of Caesar and one who came to be made a king of a kingdom not of this world.  Pilate representing Roman rule came to realize that Christ was not a man who was going to lead a rebellion against Rome.  Pilate came to understand that Jesus was an innocent man.  But Pilate also had a problem.  Judea was an unruly province and Caesar didn’t care much for the details of how Pilate kept the peace in Judea and maintained the authority of Roman law over the province.  Pilate served a lord and his sole purpose was to maintain Roman rule and Roman law over the peoples of Judea.  Pilate’s decision to crucify Christ was a decision to maintain the peace of the province and to maintain Roman law over the province.  Rome was more important than any one man.  To preserve Rome’s authority in a province was more important than the life or rights of a single innocent man wrongly accused.  Pilate washed his hands of the affair and did what needed to be done to maintain the peace of Rome in the province of Judea.  But Christ came to establish his kingdom in a new way and at the foundation of his kingdom was not the power of a military conquest, but the power of God’s love.  The individual of an empire was in Roman thinking an obstacle to the greatness of the collective power of Rome.  If an individual threatened Roman peace and Roman law then he could be justifiably swept under the power of Rome with the washing of one’s hands.  But in Christ’s kingdom it was to be wholly different.  It was to be recognized that through a single man came sin and death, and therefore through a single man would come a death and resurrection that brought forth salvation, redemption, forgiveness and a new and eternal life to a whole world of sinners.  Rome could justify killing an innocent man to preserve a collective peace.  But in the kingdom of Christ, it would be through one just man that his offering of himself in death would become the foundation stone upon which a new kingdom not of this world was to be built.  The nations of this earth rule by military might, the kingdom not of this world rules through love as one offers his life in death for sinners that such sinners might receive the new life of Christ’s triumphant resurrection life.  This is the way God shows his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  This is the kingdom not of this world and any nation who raises its head in competition will find itself in a war that it cannot win.  Yet this is what the nations must do for there was a lord of this world above Caesar who had long ago enticed mankind to reach out for the forbidden so that we could instead of worshipping God might try to live our lives out as if we were gods.  He will entice the nations with grand visions of what power can do employed in the world, all so as to obscure from our understanding that it is not power but love that transforms men and women and creates goodness out of evil.

            There were the Roman soldiers shown in the Gospel accounts to be gambling for Christ’s vestments.  Depending on one’s perspective soldiers are either valiant men who offer their lives for great causes or the scourge of the earth who wield the sword and are often the final protectors of the most grotesque tyrants the world has ever known.  Perhaps there is truth in both the praise of soldiers and the condemnation of them.  Soldiers often give themselves valiantly for the defense of their homelands and their ways of life.  An American soldier who had fought in Iraq captured both sentiments as he spoke of his service in Iraq.  On the one hand he entered the service to defend American freedoms.  He served in Iraq and the defense of those alongside of him was important to him.  He spoke seldom about the fighting he had been in, but once after describing some of the techniques of fighting the “terrorists” in various places in Iraq he added, “But I can also see their perspective.  If a foreign army was in my country I might be the one placing IED’s in the road.”  The soldier often discovers in wartime that war is seldom a black and white issue without shades of gray.  Each side’s soldiers think they are fighting for something.  Each side’s soldiers, in the midst of war, often grow disillusioned with their place in the battlefield.  They often find they cannot share in the grand patriotism of those who seem to most vigorously support their cause.  They have seen more than their souls or consciences can fathom.  But whatever they think of themselves they also don’t see their buddy beside them as evil.  So they learn the way of survival rather than the pursuit of glory as they serve in a war.  They learn that a good soldier is part of a unit that battles as a unit under a battle plan.  Questions of conscience are not as important to survival as learning to follow orders.  I suspect this is the sort of hardened consciences and souls that characterized the Roman soldiers following Pilate’s orders.  They had learned not to question orders, not to decide their battle actions based on their own consciences.  But one of the Roman soldiers seeing Christ die came to see Christ’s death differently than he had seen any other thing he had ever seen in his service to Rome.  He saw a man on the cross in complete composure of himself.  This man experienced great pain and suffering.  This man did not hide his feeling of suffering with a false bravado, but this man also in his depth of suffering uttered a prayer for his tormentors.  He was every bit a man yet he prayed for mercy toward his tormentors rather than vengeance.  He was dying but sought to comfort a grieving mother and disciple standing near him.  He kept his composure and saw his own death as finishing something.  This soldier saw it all and his soldier’s code of silencing conscience and following orders gave way to expressing his admiration for one who must be more than any other man he had ever known.  He saw what he saw and declared “Truly this man was the Son of God.”  Here was a man who did not likely understand all he saw but was being impacted by the astonishing love of God demonstrated the day Christ died.

            There were also two thieves next to Christ, also being crucified on the day Christ died.  It seems that at first both of these thieves were joining in insulting Christ.  But for one of them, as he watched from his own death post, he began to see something differently in the way Christ was dying.  He told the other felon not to ridicule Christ, for they had both done things for which they deserved to die, but that Christ was an innocent man.  Then he turned to Christ and asked Jesus to permit him to enter his kingdom when Jesus entered his.  Jesus told the sinner turning to him that this day he would be in paradise.  Surely this man had come to know that in the death of Christ for sinners, God had shown us his great love.

            Some of those impacted by God’s display of love in the death of Christ did not have an immediate conversion to Christ.  There were many who had opposed Christ that must have had seeds of doubt planted into their thoughts as they watched Christ die.  They would find it impossible to put things together until fifty days later.  They would be in the temple when St. Peter and the other disciples began preaching Christ as the way of salvation.  At one point St. Peter would describe how some of them present in his hearing had helped godless men put Christ to death.  This was a charge that would have angered a Jew in that time.  Jews described “Gentiles” as godless men.  Christ had been put to death by religious leaders groveling at Pilate’s feet to put their religious enemy to death.  Perhaps some of those who responded in the temple when St. Peter preached had watched at Calvary when Jesus had died for us while we were yet sinners.  Instead of rejecting St. Peter’s charge as ridiculous hyperbole a number of those hearing St. Peter preach were struck with their guilt and responded saying, “What then must we do to be saved?”  It was perhaps quite likely that a seed of conflict within their consciences had been planted.  They cried out like Newton wrote of in his hymn.  They first learned from the gospel that their sin was heinous.  They had reason to fear for they deserved retribution for their great sin.  But then they learned that this death was for them as it was for others, and that Christ had died for them while they were yet sinners.  This was the same lesson John Newton learned when he saw his sins as a captain of ships carrying men to be enslaved saw his sin as heinous.  Yet in the cross of Christ he learned that Christ had acted to set him free from his slavery to sin.  He had great sins which required an amazing grace, and being freed from his own bondage to sin he became all the more desirous that the blight of enforced slavery would be abolished forever from the earth.

            St. Paul in Romans 5 thus sums up very well the teaching of the four Gospels on Christ’s death.  God showed his love to us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.  In the fifth chapter of Romans, St. Paul does for the theology of the Scriptures what the apostles did for the scene around Christ’s death on the cross.  The Gospel writers had set forth a multitude of men and women around Christ’s death to show that God demonstrated his love toward humanity through the death of Christ for sinners.  Each and every witness of the death of Christ had seen the great event of Christ dying for sinners.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had shown in their portrayals of Christ’s death how this death was the demonstration of God’s love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.

            St. Paul describes Christ’s death in between his praising of God in a Trinitarian formula, and his confession of mankind’s sin.  The opening verses of Romans five describe our relationship to God the Father, through Jesus Christ the Son, by the power and aid of the Holy Spirit.  Following his declaration that God shows us his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, St. Paul describes how sin entered the world through one man and then through sin came death and death spread to all men, for all had sinned.  I am not interested in parsing out all the various theological theories relating Adam’s sin to our sins, nor even to attempt to parse out what exactly is the most perfect understanding of the Trinity.  While I wish to be as free from erroneous thoughts about such matters as I can be, sometimes our endless discussions on these matters lead us to set aside the purpose for which St. Paul spoke of these matters.  We get enamored with studying individual trees and lose sight of the forest being set before us.  St. Paul was deeply interested in conveying to us that the Trinity in complete unity was showing us the love of God as Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  St. Paul was desirous of us understanding that just as through one man sin entered the world and the powers of sin overwhelmed us all so that all sinned and fell short of the glory of God, but he wanted us to understand this so that most importantly that in Christ, one man came into the world to die for our sins and to bring us into the righteousness of God so as to know the love of God shown to us in the death of Christ for us while we were yet sinners.

            I would plead with ministers who preach the Gospel.  If you preach the most perfect sermon on the dreadful nature of sin it can be so particularly correct as if lecturing on a single tree in the Amazon rain forest.  Yet what your congregation and your hearers need to understand is that even though sin entered into the human world through Adam, and death spread to all because sin overpowered us, that now because Christ came into the world we can be brought into the love of God who sent his son into the world so that he could die for us while we were yet sinners and reverse that curse that came through Adam.  Now instead of seeing Adam’s story as the story of mankind, we are invited to see that through Christ came life and righteousness.

            The same is true of the doctrine of predestination.  In essence there are two paths of predestination and only two paths.  There is the path of that destiny to which our sins would take us, ever further and further removed from the love of God.  But that path is to be proclaimed only to encourage that there is another path of predestination.  It is the path of predestination in Christ.  Christ is the chosen one, the chosen cornerstone upon which the temple of God’s people is being built and brought together.  In Christ there is a destiny that has been sealed by God’s love toward those who are drawn to hope and live in Jesus Christ.  The Gospel is proclaimed freely unto all men and women that they by hearing and believing the Gospel message might forsake the destiny wrapped up in disobedience and sin so as to obtain the destiny of life in Christ.  That is a destiny discovered and experienced in unity with Christ, a unity begun by believing upon the gospel.  That is a unity expressed in our baptism into the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That is a unity expressed in Holy Communion when partaking of the elements expressing Christ’s body and blood we partake of him with one another and celebrate our shared destiny as the people of God united in and through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

            St. Paul I suspect wanted for us to understand that not one doctrine of the Holy Scriptures could be declared and proclaimed apart from the centrality of all reality that God shows us his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  That is a message which will capture the attention of Roman soldiers, Pharisees, thieves, old white men with too much pride in their morality and theology, and young people seemingly at a distance from others with their hip-hop gangster rap music that has seemingly captured the frustration of a world that makes no sense.  It is a message meant for affluent Europeans and other Westerners, and likewise for men and women of the developing world and for every tribe and tongue, culture and sub-culture upon this earth. 

In truth, all of St. Paul’s teachings on the various doctrines of the Christian faith served one purpose to convey the power and force of God’s love shown in that Christ died for us while we were sinners and to convey that love to the ends of the earth to every man and woman on this earth, and to every aspect of each of our lives.  Every doctrine mentioned by St. Paul is a wheel hung upon a gear driven by a transmission with spokes designed to transfer power and energy from the power of the engine and its drive train to be applied at the point where the rubber of the tire meets the road.  If a spoke in a wheel isn’t connected in a straight line from the center of the wheel to the wheel’s outer rim then we would acknowledge the spoke to be damaged.  The same is true for all Christian doctrine.  It either links the love of God, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to our human existence or we have a damaged spoke that needs to be fixed for the sake of the Gospel proclamation to men and women for whom Christ died while we were yet sinners.  The world seems sometimes devoid of any meaning apart from the love of God.  Christ’s death on the cross seems at first only to convey that total and complete meaninglessness of life in this world.  But then as we look upon that cross and see it and are drawn more and more into its true meaning, we see the love of God being shown in the death of Christ who died for us while we were yet sinners.

            I will leave the final word to be spoken by the disciple standing nearest the cross of Christ on that darkened day called “Good Friday.”  St. John was there alongside Jesus’ mother.  Jesus called upon him to treat her now as if he were Mary’s own son, and Jesus commended his mother to recognize that he was appointing John as his dear friend to be one who was to have the responsibility of a son in watching out and caring for Mary in the days ahead.  It is this disciple who must have spent his years thinking of all he had seen and witnessed in the life of Christ.  It is he to whom it was given the privilege of writing a simple sentence that conveys profoundly the central teaching of the Christian faith.  The lesson John learned is ultimately learned as we see that God shows his love for us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.  St. John expressed this wonderful lesson so simply, saying, “God is love.”