The Sanctification of Power

Calling all iconoclasts ...

In this, my time of transition, leaving my role as Pastor of a beloved rural Midwestern parish, and moving into a new role that has yet to be fully defined, I have found myself called again and again to hear and to bear uncomfortable witness.

Few often realize the discomfort writers ourselves feel when called upon to share uncomfortable and discomfiting truths. Especially when one is writing from a position of relative privilege or power, yet knows one’s position in that very group is tenuous, uncertain, and fraying each and every second - the writer called into the fragile work of justice feels both the burning of the soul and the knowledge that these words will likely later be used to isolate them and deny them membership in the group.

I have heard, in this past week, dismaying and even violent stories of injustice toward Black pastors in my own Christian denomination. I have heard these stories from the outside, from some rhetorical or physical distance, and thus I know that I could very easily - and have easily done in the past - hidden behind a wall of plausible white woman denial. I could say, “Well, I don’t really know the whole story.” I could say, “I don’t really know everyone involved all that well.”

I could say, I’m only a former rural 3/4 time pastor, I’m only the granddaughter of a pastor grandfather who bore his own stories of my church’s inflicted trauma, and thereby left me with the legacy not of church-based nepotism but instead of shame and secrecy, and so for a long time I never spoke his name.

I could retreat into the soft and gentle (haha, yeah right) pretend world of white middle-class motherhood, and I could write only about my children or about consumerist self-care or about gentle reminders that God loves us, all of us, an anodyne God who is impotent in the face of injustice, violence, and oppression. A God who says all the right things and then laughs behind closed doors, confident in their own righteousness and floating placidly in a sea of narcissism.

That god is not my God.

And I will be forever ashamed if I do not write the truth about my Church, a truth that is not ours alone but a truth that encompasses all of white American Christianity, that we are beholden to the sin of racism and servile to the throne of the theology of glory, which tramples upon all those who speak truth to power and threaten the status quo of institutional wealth and power.

So I will say today that I indeed do not know all the facts, and indeed I do not know all those personally involved. But God knows. God is watching. And in the stories that I have heard from two Black Lutheran pastors, Rev. Angela Khabeb and Rev. Nelson Rabell-Gonzalez (who is Afro-Latino and was born in Puerto Rico), I have heard echoes of what I have heard from so many others about the tyranny of power and the institutional idolatry of our church.

It begins, as it always does in these cases, when people are abused or victimized or mistreated in what should be God’s house, with attempts at pacification and silence. The tools of gaslighting and open cruelty, served with a smile, are used to make victims question themselves and their own reality. Religious words and phrases, even prayers, are weaponized in order to protect the institution and those who lead it.

Other marginalized leaders are quickly pulled in and indirectly threatened. People step in immediately to divide the victimized leader from their friends and allies. A whisper campaign begins. But the victim is made to feel as though they’re the only one talking.

“You haven’t said anything about this to anyone, have you?”

“We need to keep this within our church.”

Sometimes therapeutic language and the work of healing is also weaponized, to make the victim feel as though they’re a patient in need of healing and treatment, and the institution is the only one who can provide a cure. They’re made to feel weak and beaten down and indebted.

Their faith, their trust in God that led them to God’s house in the first place, becomes a source of pain and shame, because it seems that it’s not only human beings who are against them but God himself, as the machinery of the Church institution puts itself in the place of God because that is what institutions and their leaders have often imagined themselves to be, and therefore they must save themselves and protect themselves at all costs.

You can see the sad and obvious parallels here to cases of police violence and brutality, and again we must remember that this happens because institutions and their most powerful leaders, whether in the police force or the government of the churches, have put themselves in the place of God. These most powerful are never the ones directly dealing with the problems of the idolatry they’ve created, but they expect others beneath them, especially those on the margins and from marginalized groups who serve the institution, to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the institution.

But our God does not sit on a throne; God dies on a Cross, tortured and tormented and bleeding because Jesus too was a threat to the idolatry of power and the impetus to protect the institutions of religion and government at all costs.

So in the name of the theology of the cross I call upon all of us who want to follow Jesus, and especially all of us who are part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, to again call our Church to account for the ways in which we remain complicit in racism and racist actions against our Church’s Black leaders, and against all marginalized leaders who do not fit into the prescribed White and privileged box that we imagine is at the center of our Church, often even maintained by Lutheran last names and specific colleges and families of pastors and church leaders who hand down institutional power to their descendants.

I call for the reinstatement of Rev. Nelson Rabell to the clergy roster, and an apology personally to him from the Sierra Pacific Synod Council and from Bishop Eaton, as well as financial restitution for this past year while Pastor Nelson has awaited justice, for his and his congregation’s mistreatment at the hands of former Bishop Megan Rohrer, who was suspended from their office and then resigned.

I call for our entire church to hear the story of Rev. Angela Khabeb, and to understand the ways in which racism manifests in White, liberal, Christian spaces - and how liberal attitudes themselves can be weaponized to excuse racism and silence Black leaders in our midst. I call for Angela’s voice to not be yet another powerful Black female Lutheran voice who is silenced by fear and white fragility. And I call upon us to hear anew the stories of other Black Lutheran women leaders in our Church who have been silenced and dismissed, and who are continuing to be silenced and dismissed today.

I call for our church not to get lost in the condemnation of the White individuals at the center of these (local) stories, because this sin is not individual but systemic, and we all share a piece of this sin; we all are called to repentance and reparation.

At the same time I call for those individuals who are in positions of institutional power in our church to be held accountable, including synodical bishops and Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton. I call for reform and restructuring and recommissioning to take place, and for clergy and lay leaders to make bold selections and organize ardently for change when it comes to elections for synod bishops, councils, and presiding bishops.

And maybe indeed it is too late for these calls. I have wondered this myself as I write these words, are we a people who have utterly lost our way?

Then I remember that also this week I have been listening, finally, to James Baldwin. It is a failure of my liberal arts undergraduate education and my seminary education and my own prolific reading that at age 37 I am for the first time really discovering James Baldwin. I read him once before, four years ago, but as I read The Fire Next Time today, I keep catching my breath, caught between wanting to set the world on fire and wanting to cry for days. Baldwin has been speaking to my soul; his truth about the Church and America and God is finally down deep in my guts, and I realize that it wasn’t too late for me, though it could have been.

Baldwin says so many ugly things in a way that’s somehow made beautiful by their truthfulness, and the one that’s sticking with me most is when he writes about religious leaders’ sanctification of power. We’ve made power the holiest thing at the center of our Church.

And now I know, that when you come in from the outside and you bust down the doors and you try so dang hard to get in to the hallowed halls of white Christian power in America, all you see is a dingy old curtain and an old man naked behind it standing on a wooden podium muttering to himself.

So I’m walking away. Away from the pursuit of power and prosperity in white American Christianity. Away from calls to politeness and quietness and saving yourself. Away from platitudes and blessing and condemnation of the speck in my neighbor’s eye while holding on to the log in my own for fear of what I might see if I remove the log.

Outside the hallowed halls of the empty sanctification of human power, there is sunlight. Cool, crisp air. There are people laughing together, hard, without self-consciousness, and picking up after each other and doing the dishes and putting away the chairs. They’re pulling up weeds and vacuuming and scrubbing the toilets. They’re singing.

Note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Bishop Rohrer was removed from their office. Bishop Rohrer was suspended and then resigned.

A Change is Gonna Come, by Sam Cooke

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