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Into All the World
A sermon in The Other Six Days series
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 22, 2007
Deuteronomy 6:1-7; Matthew 28:16-21

Deut. 7:1   When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you--the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you--   2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.   3 Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons,   4 for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.   5 But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire.   6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

Matt. 28:16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.   17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.   18 And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.   19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,   20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

I.  BEGINNING

In scoiology there's a little something called the "law of unintended consequences".   It is the political version of the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.   There are things we set out to do that cause more harm than the good that we intended to bring about.   In its modern form, it was identified and described by sociologist Robert K. Merton, in 1936. [1]   Merton listed a number of reasons why this law tended to be true, among which are ignorance, error, immediate interest, basic values, self-defeating prophecy.   All reasons why what might have been intended and what happened were different things.

Some have argued that raising the drinking age has postponed the acceptance of adult responsibility by young adults. [0] The Vancouver Sun reported yesterday that the addition of an extra two weeks of daylight savings time, which was intended to save energy, has had a number of unintended consequences.   The move has only resulted in a negligible amount of electricity savings it seems and gasoline consumption has gone up dramatically--people took advantage of the extra daylight to run more errands and drive later. [2]  

The classic example of this law is the cane toads in Australia.   In the 1930's, the Australian government imported Hawaiian cane toads to eat the beetles that were threatening their sugar cane crops.   It didn't work.   The toads didn't eat the beetles. They ate everything else and spread like wildfire.   They had no natural enemies and were poisonous to anything that ate them.   They have one of Australia's biggest ecological problems to this day. [3]

II. WHAT HAPPENED

I have to think that something like that is what happened in Christianity.   Surely God could not have intended that Jesus' instructions to his disciples could become a warrant for genocide and cultural eradication.

In the final chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives to his disciples what we have come to call the "Great Commission" the instruction that they should:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you."

This commission is meant to encourage the disciples the share the Gospel--that is, the Good News--with the whole world.   It is meant to be a warrant for bringing a message of hope and salvation to all the peoples of the earth.

And, that message certainly has been spread.   Christianity is the world's largest religion with well over 2 billion adherents.   It expanded beyond the borders of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee into the entirety of the Roman world--across the middle east and the Mediterranean.   It expanded eastward to India, northward into Northern Europe and into Russia.   From there it has crossed the Atlantic to the Americas and sailed southward to Africa and Australia.   Christianity has become a global religion.

But it did not always do so peacefully.   In fact, there is a lot of blood on the hands of the Church as it sought to go to make disciples of all nations.  

Those who suffered the most were the indigenous populations of the world, particularly the native peoples of the Americas.   Anthropologists estimate that at one time there were as many as 12 million native inhabitants of North America, with 100 million throughout the Americas.   By the beginning of the 20 th Century, there were little more than 237,000 left in North America, representing an eradication of 95% of the peoples who lived in this land.

Attitudes toward Native Americans were driven in part by racism, in part by religious prejudices.   One historian notes:

"From the beginning, the Spaniards saw the native Americans as natural slaves, beasts of burden, part of the loot. When working them to death was more economical than treating them somewhat humanely, they worked them to death. The English, on the other hand, had no use for the native peoples. They saw them as devil worshippers, savages who were beyond salvation by the church, and exterminating them increasingly became accepted policy." [4]

American colonists did their best to eradicate the natives.   I have heard tell of one schoolchild who asked her teacher about Thanksgiving, saying, "The pilgrims and the Indians got along well.   So, why aren't there any Indians around anymore?"

The Indians had to give way.   To European religion. To European settlement. To European customs.   And in the aftermath of the Revolution, the United States continued this process of displacement.   In fact, American victory in the War of Independence convinced many Americans that God had favored the United States.   That the old New England idea that America was a city on a hill, a new Israel here in the New World, meant that this nation had a manifest destiny to occupy the entire North American continent.   They began to adopt attitudes about the Indians in the land that were motivated by a strange religious fervor.

For having viewed America as a New Israel, the Indians became viewed as the Canaanites.   The people who were to be driven from the land.   Just as Deuteronomy says:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you--the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you--   2 and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.

Let us put aside the fact that unlike the Canaanites, the Indians were not mightier than the colonists. The way we treated Native Americans was most un-Christian.   The tales are almost too numerous to tell.   And so, let me tell you about the experience of one tribe with which our community has become very familiar.

A. The Cherokee

The Cherokee, along with the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, were considered to be the five "Civilized Tribes", because they were generally willing to adapt to European technology, farming instead of hunting and gathering and so on.   Many even converted to Christianity.

By the middle of the 19 th century, nearly 200 years of broken treaties had reduced the vast Cherokee lands to a small territory.   President Andrew Jackson began to insist that all southeastern Indians be moved west of the Mississippi. The federal government no longer needed the Cherokees as strategic allies against the French and British. Land speculators wanted Cherokee land to sell for cotton plantations and for the gold that was discovered in Georgia. Although the Cherokees resisted Removal through their bilingual newspaper and through legal means, taking their case all the way the Supreme Court, Jackson's policy prevailed. In 1838, events culminated in the tragic 'Trail of Tears,' the forced removal of the Cherokees in the East to Oklahoma. One quarter to half of the 16,000 Cherokees who began the long march died of exposure, disease, and the shock of separation from their home.   Today, Cherokee, NC is located in Jackson County--named after that very same Andrew Jackson.

The Cherokees in Western North Carolina today descend from those who were able to hold on to land they owned, those who hid in the hills, defying removal, and others who returned, many on foot. [5].

They would eventually be able to reclaim their land and in the 20 th Century be recognized by the Federal government.   But this history of displacement only scratches the surface.

For the churches were culpable in gross humanitarian injustices.   Cherokee children were taken from their parents, had their hair cut, were punished for speaking Cherokee, and were educated about the proper American way of doing things.   Christian missionaries supported much of this re-education, particularly when it sought to prevent ancient cultural practices or religious observances.   Christian missionaries were often at the forefront of seeking to annihilate Cherokee culture, and were complicit in the banning of Cherokee language and other means of expressing Cherokee identity.

III. WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

We should have known better.

We should have known that this could not possibly be what Christ would have wanted.   Any casual reading of the scriptures should have told us that the Gospel abhorred the slaughter of so many and the cultural oppression of so many more.  

And we should have known better if we had just been paying attention.   Every year this community makes an Alternative Spring Break trip to Cherokee, North Carolina.   While we are there we have occasion to talk to members of the community and have them explain Cherokee life and culture to us.   One man, Bo Taylor, who is an archivist at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, and a member of Cherokee United Methodist Church, comes and talks to our group every year.   He told us a story about the Europeans' encounter with the Cherokee.   He said (and I am paraphrasing):

The Europeans saw us dancing around the fire and singing songs about the sun and they thought to themselves, 'They're savages and pagans.   They worship the sun and they worship the fire.'   But they didn't understand what we were doing.
We Cherokee worship the Great Spirit, who made everything.   We believe the sun is a manifestation of the Great Spirit, but it is not the Great Spirit.   It is just a sign.   We believe that the fire that we have on earth is a sign of the presence with us of that fire in the sky.   We were not worshipping the fire, we were celebrating the fire because it, too, is a representation of the Great Spirit.   Now you know, what is the first thing that happens to a person when they die?   That's right: their body gets cold.   Because there is a fire that burns within that is connected to those other fires.  
Now, I ask you: does this idea of a fire in the heavens, a fire that dwells with us on earth, and a fire that burns within sound familiar to you at all?   Those Europeans thought we were savages, but we already had the Trinity.   They just never bothered to ask.   And so they took us and cut off our hair and kept us from speaking Cherokee, and told us that the Indian ways were not God's ways, not the way Christians should behave.   But we already knew God.

Our ignorance in our relationship is staggering.   And upon this ignorance--as Merton said--the law of unintended consequences is built.   We were ignorant about what Christ expected of us, we were ignorant about the ways that God was already moving among the native peoples of this continent.   And as a result, grave and terrible consequences occurred.

A few years ago, our host congregation in Cherokee, Cherokee UMC, was one of three congregations--the others Lutheran and Catholic--who issued statements of apology, repenting for the sins of the past.   To see Cherokee UMC today, you'd never know there was anything to repent of: traditional Cherokee are affirmed as Christians as everyone else.   No longer does a Cherokee have to chose between being an Indian and being a Christian.   The anthem that our choir is going to sing tonight, is sung all the time at Cherokee UMC, among other hymns in Cherokee.

That congregation, and their pastor Rev. Steve Phillippi, know something that our forebears could have learned better. Wesley taught of a grace that operated in three ways, prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying.   The prevenient grace was that grace that invited you into repentance and relationship with God.   But the most amazing thing about this grace as Wesley taught it, was that it was available and present everywhere to everyone.   The missionaries didn't have to bring grace to the Cherokee.   It was already there.   All they should have done was identify where it was already.

We should have known that.

IV. WHAT WE COULD HAVE LEARNED

And if we had been open to the movement of God's grace, we could have learned so much, too.

A.  The Earth

We could have learned how to better live in harmony with the creation.   So many Christians act like the creation is ours and we are masters of it.   The creation is not ours, it is God's and we are a part of it.   The Native Americans understood our relationship to the creation so much better.   Humanity is not apart from the creation, but is intimately connected with it.   A truth the Bible presents for us in the second chapter: the first human--the adam --is made out of the ground--the adamah .   We are tied to the soil and to the other animals, those whom Indians call the "four legged people".

Today is Earth Day--a special holiday when we celebrate the earth and recommit ourselves to good stewardship of the Earth.   The fact that we need to have a special day to remind us to do this shows you how disconnected we have become.

B.  Dependence and Grace

One of our Indian hosts, while leading us in the sweat lodge ritual, reminded us that we refer to the stones as grandfathers because they were here first.   They are the oldest and have long memories.   The plants, he said, were next, and needed the soil and the rocks to survive.   The animals were next, they needed the plants and the rock to survive.   We were last, and we need the animals, the plants, and the rocks to survive.   But they don't need us. Rocks can survive without plants, plants can survive without animals, and they can all survive without us.   We are the ones who need the most and are needed the least.

That kind of humility is very Christian.   A brilliant reminder of our utter dependence on God's grace and mercy.   A sure reminder of our place in the creation and thus the majesty and mystery of God's love for us.   We could have learned that too.

V. WHAT WE CAN DO FROM HERE

So what can we do?

We can admit that how we Christians have propagated the message of Christianity has not always been in accordance with how Christ would have wanted us to.   That we have caused a lot of harm to those whose protection and welfare was our charge.

We can work to rectify injustices that have occurred over the past 500 years.   We can support the rights of native communities to ancient tribal lands, and the right to preserve ancient tribal practices.

We can learn about the Native peoples who inhabited these shores, and who still do.   We can learn the history of the tribes who were here.   We can learn about their culture, their values, their way of life.

We can resist the temptation to overly romanticize or overly spiritualize the Indians into caricatures that are no more accurate than that of savage.

We can refrain from conduct like the war whoop or the tomahawk chop at sporting events.

We can stop naming our professional and collegiate sports teams after native peoples as if they were mascots.

But most of all we can learn.   We can listen.   And through learning and listening we can honor and respect.   And by respecting we show love and share love with all those whom we meet.   That, is the heart of the Gospel we are called to go into all the world to share.

 

Notes

[0] George Will, published in the West Central Tribune, at http://www.wctrib.com/articles/index.cfm?id=19148&section=opinion
[1] http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Merton%20Unintended.htm
[2] http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=748ab07b-d388-4356-adf9-928b9ed9486f
[3] http://www.fdrproject.org/pages/toads.htm
[4] http://www.religioustolerance.org/genocide5.htm (citing Hans Koning, "The conquest of America: How the Indian nations lost their continent,"   Monthly Review Press, (1993))
[5] http://www.cherokee-nc.com/history_main.php?

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Copyright © 2007. Mark A. Schaefer.

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