(93) Toleration!

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Toleration!, originally shared on February 25, 2021. It was the ninety-third video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Is tolerance enough for Christians? What are the limits of tolerance? What do we have to offer the world that is better? Today we will look at how Christians are uniquely equipped for service in these days of pandemic and political turmoil?

   More than 50,000 people have died of the coronavirus so far in California, and more than 500,000 in the United States, which I suppose makes sense since California is about one tenth of our country’s population. In the middle of March, we are expected to have so much vaccine that many more people will be able to make an appointment at the public sites. However, and there always seems to be a however these day, variants of the coronavirus are emerging that bring into question how long we will be facing virus mitigating actions and restrictions. It’s both a hopeful and discouraging time, and many people are coming to the end of their tolerance. Of course, some people never were able to tolerate the new realities in the first place. And, the hardest part of a marathon is just before the last leg.

   I read once that there is a French saying that goes, “To understand everything (about a person), is to forgive everything.” This, of course, assumes that everyone has good intentions, and/or cannot be held responsible for their actions.

   We are taught from an early age to, at least, be tolerant. We are taught to be tolerant of people who are different from ourselves because it’s better for everyone that we get along and, well, they just can’t help it. Tolerance means that we should put up with things or people.

Tolerance is said to be one of the goals of a liberal arts education but, since that rarely happens anymore, we have seen a decline of tolerance.

   In fact, for Christians, it’s not enough to be tolerant. It never was. And that kind of tolerance has no integrity.

   The belief that all people are created by God as human beings in God’s image and therefore all people have the potential of a living relationship with the living God, that the common relation we have with from our common relationship with God in Jesus Christ produces our common relationship with all Christians, and our belief that we have been made children of God and are therefore brothers and sisters of one another, are ultimately expressions of love.

   The Christian ethic of both the love of God and love love of neighbor takes us way beyond putting up with people. The selfless love of God with which we are called to love even equips us to love our enemies.

   Paul writes to the church at Rome, the 1^st chapter, starting at the 9^th verse:

*Romans 12:9-21  

   Why do we care for our enemies in need? Because that would be heaping burning coals on their heads? Does that sound right to you? Many scholars have looked at this passage as being an example of a literal translation, that misses the dynamic equivalent. Have you ever seen someone who is truly embarrassed? Their face turns red, their ears turn red and the tips of their ears are even redder. The “burn” with embarrassment. That is the result and purpose of acting in love. It brings shame in an honor and shame culture that results in life transformation.

   That is what the love of God at work in us does. It brings forth transformation. It brings forth repentance. It brings forth forgiveness. And it brings forth more love.

   And it brings forth the limits of tolerance.

   The term “toleration” kind of sounds like a hillbilly expletive, but it’s actually a word. It comes from the Latin word “tolerare” and means “to put up with”. It means to tolerate actions or practices that a person considers to be wrong, but tolerable.

   Toleration is expected to be lived today on steroids. We are we are expected to endorse behavior that we may find problematic, and even to advocate for those whose world view is hostile to ours, even as they grow into the majority and then vote tolerance out of existence.

   There are many things that our culture has tolerated in many places that we no longer do, like racial prejudice, cruel jokes, sexual harassment, and behavior that demeans other people. At least, it’s no longer publicly acceptable. Respect for all people is fundamental to the Christian life.

   But respect for all people, as people, is not the same as toleration of all behavior, though the world and even many in the Church have ignored the difference in order to further their aims. There are limits, or better in today’s language that one colleague called, pastel prose, “boundaries”.

   Christians were persecuted in the first few centuries of life by the Roman Empire, but they weren’t persecuted because of their faith. Christians were persecuted because of their intolerance.

   The Romans could care less what their conquered peoples believed, if they believed that the beliefs of every other conquered people in the empire were just as valid. The expected all conquered peoples to believe the same of the religions of other conquered people, as well as those of the Romans. Any exception could threaten the unity and peace of the empire.

   The Romans and Greeks and their conquered nations had many gods. The stability of the Empire depended upon internal unity.

   Christians and Jews believed and taught that there was only one God. That made all other gods invalid, untrue, and without any actual existence. To make things worse for Christians, the Romans had a high regard for ancestors. Christians were seen as a sect that had broken away from the beliefs of their ancestors.

   And then the Romans declared that the Emperor was a god. Their subject peoples could believe in however many gods they wanted, as long as they also recognized the Roman Emperor as a god and worshipped him by at least throwing a pinch of incense into the flames in the emperor’s temples, to provide the glue that would hold the Empire together.

   Christians said no, and that the empire could not tolerate. They were persecuted for their insistence that there is only one God, and that this God entered human history in Jesus as fully God and fully human being and suffered and died for all humanity. That he had died on the cross, a punishment reserved for the worst of the worst, the penalty for treason. That he was the messiah. That the Kingdom of God was at hand.

   This was difficult even for Christians. I read once that archeologists could find no churches that were built in a cross-shape, or that had recognizable crosses within them, for the first few hundred years of the Christian Church. (It was kind of an embarrassment, the scandal, the skeleton in the Church’s closet. It would be, as Fr. Nicky Gumbel has said, as if people today were wearing little electric chairs around their necks and saying “Our god died in the electric chair for you. There would be kind of a stigma attached.) Christians often called themselves, “followers of The Way”.

   This was absurd to the Romans and intolerable to the empire. Christians were denied entrance into the army (the only path to public service jobs), they were imprisoned, tortured, and put to death, sometimes for entertainment in public spectacles. Christians persevered in their proclamation of the reality of God’s and said that it was better to be faithful without compromise, even if they were to lose everything.

   Suppose the circumstances of the Roman Empire were in force today in the United States. Is there any doubt that many voices, including the most progressive in the Church, would be calling for tolerance and acceptance of other religions?

   It happened in the first centuries. People would say, “Why should I and my family endure the consequences of persecution. I’ll throw the incense in the flame. God will know I don’t believe it in my heart,” and they avoided the pains. When the persecution ended, and those who had endured came back from prison, when the families of those who had suffered, even lost loved ones, where brought face-to-face with those who had taken the path of avoidance, what do you think happened? They were reconciled with one another. That’s not tolerance, that is love for the sake of Someone outside of ourselves.

   One of the contributions to this tension that Lutheran have made and which I believe needs to be better promoted and taken more seriously is the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. Simply put, it means that God reigns in this world through both the Kingdom of God in the Church and the Kingdom of This World through good government.

   What saves us is the acknowledgement that we are one nation “under God”. Without that clause, Christians would find it very difficult to live with integrity in any country.

   We, like the first Christians, believe that there is one true living God and that all others are false. The one true living God makes people uncomfortable because God calls us to be good citizens by recognizing that God reigns through both the civil and the religions expressions of God in the world. But, we all live under the judgement and grace of God.

   Let’s look at our current circumstances. How comfortable do you feel talking about your faith with someone who is not a Christian? How comfortable do you feel talking about your faith with someone who is a Christian? We are taught tolerance for the sake of national unity, not even cultural unity because that would be prejudice.

   How comfortable are you when you hear or read, “the one true living God?” Does it make you want to respond with the voice of the Church or the voice of the world?

   Tolerance is not the chief value of the enlightened. It is the chief value of empires, or of those seeking to build one.

   But Christians don’t live in empires. We live in a kingdom, the Kingdom of God. We don’t seek social or political uniformity.

   We seek a community built around another ethic, the ethic of love, love for one another, because we have first been loved by the one true living God.

   I appreciate the words of the president of the World Parliament of Religions, which gathers leaders of the world’s religions every 10 years, who opened one such gathering by saying something like, “Our task is not to agree with one another. Our task is to acknowledge that we have rival truth claims without killing each other.” To the world, that is a ridiculously low threshold for tolerance, but for people of all religions, that is a goal that has integrity.

   We don’t cast down altars. We tolerate that which we don’t agree with or even like. But, we also do not give up any of our beliefs in order to be accepted by our culture, to be thought of as good citizens, or avoid persecution.

   Is this a problem for making Christianity attractive to our cultures and country?

   But, we don’t attract people by pandering to them, at least not for long. We can make church members, but not Christians. We attract people by proclaiming something that is actually true, by faithfulness to our core beliefs. That is what make our faith go viral. It’s alive, it grows, and it reproduces.

   We are a particular people, called to an exceptional ethic. It is exceptional because it cannot arise from human selfishness. It can only come from God, because it is in the nature of God: Love. The kind of love expressed in the Greek word: agape. The kind of love with which God loves us, expressed mist plainly in the death of Jesus Christ at the cross so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life forever, starting right now and extending in its perfection in the life to come.

   Let’s soak in those word of Paul in his letter to the Romans one more time:

*Romans 12:9-21

   We are people of the Holy Spirit, living water, the third person of the one true living God.