Subservience to supremacists is the unfortunate message of Sunday’s non-Gospel readings. The Old Testament reading glorifies people’s subservience to an earthly supremacist, Joshua, and to the heavenly supremacist, Yahweh, Joshua helped invent. Traveling among various tribes each with their invented deities, Joshua incites submission to Yahweh from the people, “If it does not please you to submit to Yahweh, decide today to whom you will submit.” Joshua is employing deadly shaming. If he judges a lack of submission to him / Yahweh, it is a betrayal subjecting one to death as a traitor. The New Testament reading shows Paul glorifying wives’ submission to their supremacist husbands, “wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.” Paul too is employing deadly shaming, again judging a lack of submission to the husband as a betrayal subjecting a woman to degradation if not death. Joshua and Paul are both supremacists and promote the subservience of common people to supremacists. Fortunately, Jesus’ Gospel witness is to communion.
Institutional christianity, unfortunately, promotes Joshua’s and Paul’s sanctified supremacy and betrays Jesus’ Gospel witness to communion. Jesus’ witness to communion is most evident in the Gospel fact that Jesus was not a religious supremacist, in other words, Jesus was not a priest. We know Jesus was a common laborer who was not ordained and did not ordain. He related in communion. Followers of Jesus are among those less able to live in communion because institutional christianity is subservient to priest supremacists. They too shame people into subservience to them. That priests do so is most horrifically evident in their history of sex abuse. The facts surfacing this past month in Pennsylvania about priest sex abuse and the shaming done to those abused are facts that exist across history and across the world. In Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes authors Thomas P. Doyle, A.W.R. Sipe, and Patrick J. Wall, all priests or former priests, explain the supremacist class and their ability to shame. “The isolation of clerics into a special caste within the church formed the basis of clericalism, the belief that clerics form a special elite corps and, because of their powers as sacramental ministers, they are superior to the laity and should be treated as such.” Unfortunately, all supremacists promote themselves as a special class and are guilty of the same if not worse acts of sexual abuse as priests. All supremacists, political, financial, and religious, promote the sanctity of their class. It is they who invented their mirror image gods that sanctify their status and justify shaming people into subservience to them. Much of humanity, throughout history and currently, lives under a subservient mindset intended by supremacists – that to challenge a supremacist is to challenge god. The intended mindset enables supremacists to abuse people – religiously as priests do but also politically and financially and to sanctify doing so. Thus, the supremacist system includes political abuse that undermines and destroys human rights. This includes abusing people’s right to life – food, health care, medicine, shelter, security, jobs, and peace as well as our right to conscience, speech, and movement. The supremacist system also includes the financial abuse of capitalism. Capitalism abuses people for monetary gain through slavery, debt bondage, poverty, minimum wages, prisons, union busting, bank bailouts, and the arms race. Humanity suffers abuse because a supremacist class across systems devises it and sanctifies it.
Peacemakers are a communion of commoners who live free of all the Joshuas, Pauls, priests, presidents, and CEO’s. We live free of all their invented and sanctified supremacies. When Jesus’ first listeners came to understand the radical nature of communion, they felt afraid. Some returned to their old lives of subservience and left their new radical life of freedom. “Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Peter answered him, “Teacher, to whom shall we go?” We are called to live free with persons who respect our freedom.
Prayer: Spirit, we live in the courage of communion
Question: What persons or institutions of abuse are still attempting to shame me or others?
August 26, 2018 Gospel John 6:60-69 Twenty First Sunday in Ordinary Time
Peg, this is by far one of my favorite entries on Peace Farms. Your eloquence but directness in addressing institutional abuse goes to the heart of what is wrong with this world. I wish more people could read this. I have an expriest friend who is more than angry about the latest sex abuse scandals in the church. But this is only one facet of power and subservience. Most institutions are corrupt and abuse. Thanks for speaking out on this issue. Your preaching needs to go viral!!
It feels like we’re on the cusp of a great awakening. Much of the degredation and violence is crafted by a few for the benefit of a few and we can change that. It’s a radical undertaking that will be opposed but we can do it.