While each of these concepts start with the word freedom, they guard and protect it in unique ways in unique situations. Constitutional protections are different from religious habits. Still, these ideas blend and sometimes confuse. When people argue for freedom of the pulpit, they are arguing for an individual, alone, interpreting the word of God. That freedom is different. It is communal. It is necessarily dialogical, involving an interpreter, a scripture, and a listener.
In humor, it matters whether people laugh at your jokes.
In the (Christian) pulpit, it matters whether people are moved to the gospel in your sermon. “Don’t be a great preacher; Preach a Great Gospel,” said Charles Taylor, a truly great preacher who led people to a great gospel.
In religion, we are necessarily personal. Our thoughts about the divine reflect our experience of the divine and rarely do we alert others to our inner relationship with the one called God. Even and perhaps especially secular people need the protection of their privacy.
In speech, we are simultaneously individual and collective. Not yelling fire in a crowded theater comes to mind as a very good safeguard on the freedom of speech. Today, we are surrounded by hate speech which inflames, while assuming constitutional protection. This hate devolves to physical wounds regularly. Minorities certainly need protections and haters and frighteners need limitations. All thoughts may be welcome, but all behaviors are not. All people may be welcome to a worship service and the preacher may have freedom of personal thought. But all behaviors are not welcome in a worship service. There are right and wrong ways, better and worse ways to disagree about interpretation. The parishioner has as much freedom to disagree with the sermon as the preacher has to preach it. All have access to the free interpretation of the text.
Here I move beyond the generalities of these freedoms into two specific cases, one the short story In a Strange Country from Ralph Ellison’s mind, showing the devolution of free speech into hate into physical wound. Ellison makes art out of this process in an instructive way. The story is about an American soldier, named Carter, who is black, going out for an evening in a foreign country, and getting assaulted by his own colleagues, who are white, from the boat. A barkeeper, Catti, helps him out.
The other case is of my experience in the pulpit in a non-violent exchange with a pianist who cried blasphemy at the end of one of my sermons.
Both involve a constitutionally protected American in a strange land, one in Wales, the other in Mexico. They reach beyond the “localism” of the constitution and American traditions of pulpits. They show how attempts to blind, attempts to quiet, attempts to silence difference often result in their opposites. They show the power of music to bind. They complicate diversity. They cause patriotism to increase rather than diminish. One is a physical violence, the other a verbal one. Both hurt. Suffering improves us.
Ralph Ellison wrote his short story in 1944, and you could say it was a war story as its hero is a warrior. His war is much longer than the one called “second.” A merchant marine gets beat up in Wales, by fellow soldiers, while on the way out for an evening, on a leave. As said earlier, they are white; he is black. He finds comfort amongst strangers and music in a pub. Carter is a black person who is more human outside his own country than in it. He is serving to defend a country where he is not at home. If we fight, he and others thought perhaps we will be all right. They were wrong. The injury lingers no matter where you are.
He first explains the wound to his eye as “a family thing.” By the end of the very short story, he is less able to see physically but clearly has a new version of vision. He has had an awakening. He is woke. He wakes up while becoming physically more blind.
The music that the Welsh people sing is very important to them. He felt that he should have known more about the Welsh and their history, and their art, the way they knew so much about him. There is a dissonance and an assonance to the whole story. At a certain point in the evenings’ short denouement, he smiles, aware suddenly of “an expansiveness that he had known before only at mixed jam sessions.” He had never known white men so closely. “All evening he had been exposed (to this awakening,) blinded by the brilliant light of their deeper humanity, and they had seen him for what he was, and for what he should have been. He was sober and sobered.
Mid-jam, he remembered “you live on the ship.” He is mistrustful of the offered community. Still, there was something in the music, in the way they held their heads that was strangely moving. His eye throbbed. A wave of guilt shook him, followed by a burst of relief. They sang an American song, obviously for him. They knew an American song. Proof of the flag became international. It wasn’t American; it was something larger and better than that.
”For the first time in your whole life, he thought, the dream was like wonder, the words are not ironic.” Music, the song, and the singing “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” Then, they invited him to move to Wales, and Parker was invited to be a part of their club, and he responded. They insisted: “I wouldn’t rest until he joined the club. What about it, Mr. Parker?”
But Parker could not reply. He headed out of the bar and several of his new acquaintances joined him, walking him “home.” “He held Mr. Catte’s flashlight like a club and hoped his black eye would hold back the tears.”
The story ends with him having fresh eyes, though wounded.
Often disruption disrupts us enough to have fresh eyes. Fresh eyes mean the freedom to interpret out own experience. While the constitutional “freedom of speech” has nothing to do with a storied actual event of racism, it exists to protect the minority from the majority. It acknowledges words of hate descending into actions of violence. These are prohibited elsewhere in our laws. It exists to protect freedom for all, which is rarely, if ever, easy, even in the freest nation in the world.
For me, in a small but parallel experience, I too have fresh eyes.
It happened right after the sermon preached on November 29, 2023, on Christ the King Sunday at the Community church in San Miguel de Allende Mexico.
I didn’t really know the pianist. She had just started the job, so had I, as Minister in residence for two months. She was meant to be permanent or as permanent as any part timer in a small expat community.
I was coming off the boat too for an evening of rest and renewal. The experience was more like a sabbatical than anything else for me, having just retired from 15 years at a large and demanding congregation in NYC.
I preached the sermon I preached as my fifth of the twelve in my assignment. It was mid-assignment, the Sunday right after Thanksgiving and before Advent, a liturgically demanded lull in the season. Its subject was about the language of king being used to describe Jesus. I gently suggested that the language was not helpful and fundamentally inaccurate. Yes, I was being gently provocative. My previous subjects were much more safe, easy, evergreens. My subjects were things like aging well or finding the Holy Spirit in everyday life. They stuck like glue to the lectionary scriptures.
This one was a low-cost form of personal entertainment. I wanted to stretch to tackle a more interesting topic about the strength of Jesus ‘s power. It was a sign of respect to the intelligence and openness of the gathered people. They were well tutored in Christianity. I wanted to show people how and why I love Jesus, as someone who used his power well. I said three times, “this is just my opinion, I know others have others.”
At the end of the sermon, the pianist threw her heavy shoulder bag over her heavy shoulder and yelled BLASPHEMY and walked out. One of the English or British members of the congregation, Rosie jumped up and said, “I’m with her, I’m with Donna.”
This support was the LAST thing I needed. I didn’t want a barroom brawl. Other murmurs lingered and some got louder. I knew we were in a lot of trouble, if this became an on-the-spot debate about kings and Jesus. Unmoderated dysregulation would ensue. I took my hands and push them down to the floor and said please no. Silence was an enormous relief.
A retired clergy person got up and led the prayer cycle that was supposed to happen at that point in the well-ordered service. He sincerely prayed “a Capella” and unprepared. “May we learn some day, some way to appreciate each other and our differences. May we respect freedom of the pulpit and the freedom of the listener….” I was moved by his leadership and the spirit within it. It also alerted the congregation that someone was still in charge of the service, the way I had been till this moment.
Lorelei, the former musician was in the congregation. She happens to be married to the chair of the board. I was thinking, as I sat there, dumbfounded, and numb, that I should invite someone to play the rest of the service. I couldn’t move. Unbidden, Lorelei was already at the piano. She started playing, first instrumentally, and then, she signaled to the congregation that they should rise and sing. These instructions were not in the bulletin, although they should be. There were many tears including mine. She reminded me of Mr. Catti. And the music in his bar. Brawl is one thing in a bar, music another.
We sang it over and over. Then we proceeded with the simple communion that an English-speaking church of multiple denominations, including higher and lower kinds, enjoy. Unfortunately, while presiding over the community and breaking the bread, and the body of Jesus, who is not a king, but a fellow traveler, I was wondering what we were going to do for Advent with no musician. In addition to some Christians not liking Christ as King, others don’t like finding and interviewing good musicians for the Christmas season. Still others think that communion is the combination of the sacred and the profane, the body and the spirit, the eternal and the common. I don’t know what Rosie thinks but I know it is something like that and forgave myself for worrying about what to do next as I bid the invitation to the table, not knowing who was going to come forward or not. They all did, restoring regulation and order to the liturgy.
The leadership of the congregation, gratefully, did not consult with me about their letting a staff person go for disrupting a worship service. I would have been mightily confused; doesn’t everyone get a second chance in the Christian practice? The leaders did put the request for her resignation, which she had offered immediately, into a letter that said, “we have theological differences here, and we expect to have them. It is much better to express to them privately than in public, and this kind of interruption of a worship service cannot be tolerated. With sadness, we let you go.” (I rehearse my earlier mantra about freedom. All people are welcome. All opinions are welcome. All behaviors are not.)
I didn’t know till later that day that the executive committee of the congregation made their decision in a corner during the coffee hour, within 30 minutes of the incident. I thought that was a pretty class act for what are usually slow as molasses governance forms. In their decisiveness, they were protecting the public, they were protecting freedom, they were acting for the whole and its freedoms within the whole.
Their immediate protection of the public worship space, the home of freedom of the pulpit, is a crucial part of the story. Mr. Parker was in the sacred space of the bar being protected by people and music.
At around two p.m., I called the musician and she said she was terribly sorry. I didn’t know she had been fired. I just wanted to know what she needed/wanted/experienced. Why did she do that? She said she was on new medication, her father was a fundamentalist evangelical preacher, and she had no idea what happened to her. She was in tears. She also said that she really needed the job. The one that she only had for one month.
About 3 o’clock the chair of the board phoned me and said that they had let her go after a brief meeting during the coffee hour. (She is now living with her family and receiving care. I wish her only good things and another congregant and I gave her some money to make the trip back to the states. I wish the congregational leadership had given her a severance. She almost didn’t take the money the congregant and I offered. She was genuinely sorry about her outburst.)
I did not circulate in the coffee hour because I didn’t want people taking sides. I also had no idea what to say. I was dumbfounded. People tell me that it was an extremely important religious experience for them, especially the return to the sacred after the profanity of difficulty had disrupted us. And I know it was for me.
Appendix ONE: The Text and the Sermon
Matthew 25: 31 – 46, Text of Separating the Sheep and the Goats
The Sheep and the Goats
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes, and you clothed me, I was sick, and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
THE SERMON:What kind of King is Jesus?
People around the world celebrate this Sunday as Christ the King Sunday. The story only appears in Matthew, not in the other gospels. It has an afterthought to it, like the child who comes when the other three are in high school or the long-lost key shows up after you’ve paid to make the new set. It is a fragment story. And it internally contradicts itself.
On the one hand, there is the triumphalism of Christianity – Jesus the greatest, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the King, Lord of Lords, and King of Kings. Jesus the Christ sitting on the thrones separating the sheep from the goats, being mean to some and good to others.
Then Jesus opens his mouth and says that we will find him in the lost, the last, the least. You want to see me? Look in the naked, the ones with cardboard in their shoes. Look in the hungry, the ones with their hands out on the corner. Did you visit me in prison? Did you give me a cup of water? Did you reduce the phone charges so I could call my family from here? Pretty hard questions but showing a deeper mercy for the poor than either the sheep or the goats.
Internal contradictions abound in Christianity, and I will attend only one today. It is the fundamental contradiction between Jesus and Christ. Many resolve it by giving Jesus the last name Christ. Jesus Christ, more often heard as a curse than not. But it is only one theological resolution to a really big problem.
It is the problem the text demonstrates. What is he doing wearing robes sitting high and mighty judging the world while talking about the lost and the least?
I have a personal, theologically unpopular resolution to this problem. Forgive me for hauling it out on Christ the King Sunday but it would be dishonest not to say it. I don’t use the word Christ for Jesus. I use the word Jesus for Jesus. Many have what is known as a high Christology, that is Jesus on the throne and on such a high throne that it is Jesus as the Only God that is true. Christ implies that one God theory. Or best God theory. The My God is bigger than your God theory. My House is bigger than your house. My nation is better than your nation. You might call it the IVY League theory of God.
I just don’t think that is who Jesus is. He is much more the community college type or vocational school type. He didn’t come to make fun of Buddhists or to compete for the highest throne. There is much more biblical evidence that he chose to be small. To come down. To join the club of the poor and the imprisoned. Jesus didn’t come to make fun of Jews here. He didn’t come to compete with Yahweh or Ruach or Breath or any of the Jewish versions of the Divine. He didn’t come to be on top of anyone but rather to be among us all. He didn’t come to contest with the Muslims either. Their prophet is very similar to our prophet, even much of the Koran is exactly like our bible. My reluctance to use the word Christ is here. Christ implies self-aggrandizement. I have the best God. For me, Jesus is the best God but that is because I am a cradle Christian and I know him the best. I’m not acquainted with other Gods. I am acquainted with him. He is my neighbor God and had I been born in Japan; I might have had another version of the ultimate and not even use the word God.
I’m not attacking the concept of Christ as moving it to the second tier of faith. I can sing the hymns that use the word Christ. I can pray with others who use the word Christ. But I can’t imagine that the Jesus would want to enter the God sweepstakes or the God Olympics. He is the opposite of corrupted religious motion. Do you know the concept “Land the Fall” in the Olympics. I think that is what Jesus is doing. He comes down and lands the fall.
I have no need to convince you of the rightness of my viewpoint. You may and must have your own opinion on this matter. Being right about God is a mistake. Even this strange text and its judgmental conclusion is not my cup of tea. I don’t think Jesus condemns those who can’t believe in him. I think he loves them and understands the moral and spiritual injury of people warring and I do mean warring over whose god is best.
I had the strangest experience at the Hartford Airport last Christmas. I had to get there super early for a flight. I was bleary eyed. There was a lovely chair next to the player piano that was playing Christmas Carols. I took it. While I was sitting there, this amateur mystic had a mystical experience. The longest line to the so-called security check point was in the paid line, you know the one where you get a subscription and get to go ahead of everyone else? That line was super long, all the way out to the door. The other line, the regular line for the regular losers, the coach class, was super short. I was so mystified that I left my good seat by the piano and went over to check out my vision. I thought about getting new glasses, which would have been a good title for this sermon. Get New Glasses about God? Anyway, the last were first and the first were last and I figured the Christmas Carols were right. I think that Jesus is the one who put those lines in their right order. You who are high and mighty are hereby abandoned on behalf of the last and the lost. You’re going to get there late and the last and lost are going first in the world Jesus wants.
OK. I don’t think Jesus chooses between the goats and the sheep either. I think he prefers – preferential priority for the poor is what the Pope calls it – I think he prefers the poor and tolerates the rich. I think everybody gets to heaven, eventually. When you are saved by grace through faith alone, you do get to have your own thoughts about the bible. It’s a privilege and an enormous responsibility.
I am profoundly affected by one Ted Talk which I recommend above all others. It is titled the Danger of a Single Story, told by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie. She says that God made multiple stories and did so intentionally. That’s why we have the good voodoo and the bad voodoo, alongside Christians with Christ and Christians with Jesus and Jews who like Jesus and Muslims who like Jews. Ah. That would help, wouldn’t it? We need to help religion itself get unlocked, unstuck, unfrozen so we ourselves as ordinary people can become unlocked, unstucked, unfrozen. Without that kind of breakthrough, the lines at the airport will always be the same. We can be right in wrong ways and wrong in right ways and wrong in wrong ways but never right in right ways. That is beyond our pay grade as people. God sent Jesus to clean up that mess about whose God was bigger and best.
In another life I have the privilege of teaching Chaplaincy to Muslim students. As is usual in teaching, I am the student, they are the teachers. We often teach what we need to learn. Due to the great increase in the number of Muslim immigrants in the U.S., hospitals and universities and prisons are all desperate for Muslim Chaplains. These students are well trained in their Koran and have the same problems that many Christians do in assuming that their religion is the best religion. To be a chaplain, however, is to learn how to regard your religion of origin with great pride while not overdoing it. You may get to die with a person who is Christian this afternoon, a Jew that evening and a Buddhist in the morning. You need to know all the last rites not just a few of them. And you need to know when NOT TO USE anything traditional at all. Muslim students often have a very hard time refusing evangelizing. So do Christians. Anyway, back to the story. In any of these chaplain settings, half your population at least is going to be NONE OF THE ABOVE. They are going to be what we call post-secular people. Shorthand for them is people who do horoscopes, have a great sense of “spirituality but not religion”, believe in a vague kind of God and are as fed up with secularism as they are with religion. These people are the ones Jesus would go to first. They are on the edge. They want above all to be sincere about something as important as faith and they don’t want to lie about their faith just to look good. Churches avoid these people like the plague and these people avoid churches like the plague. Why? Because of the way too many Christians use the word Christ. Our god or the highway. Emphasizing belief in the triumphal God when the very man Jesus, the “son of man and the son of God” didn’t talk to people about them having the right faith. He talked about getting them food and water and clothing and unstuck and out of the jails they / we create for them.
Every 500 years Christianity has a great reawakening. Phyllis Tickle, religion editor of Publisher’s Weekly for three decades put it this way: Every 500 years the church has to have a big rummage sale and get rid of stuff. In honor of Christ the King, I’d like to throw out the idea that Jesus is the only way to the ultimate divine Creator. He is a great way. We get there by paying attention to the least and the lost, the God who came down and joined us in redeeming creation.
Before closing, let me say something personal about you and how more Jesus and less Jesus Christ might affect your week. Many of us have a serious fear that the human species is devolving. We wonder about our children and where they will get water or shelter if they can’t go outside because it is too hot. We wonder about their children. And we feel strangely impotent about what we might do to help. We see Artificial Intelligence on the horizon and talk to robots pretty much every day on a screen or a phone line. We wonder if it will hurt or help us evolve as a species. This devolution is troubling to our hearts and while we drink our morning coffee. Covid jumped on it and exacerbated it. My antidote to this chronic crisis on multiple levels is to seek out the new revelation of God. I believe the power of God’s love for the human (and also the burro and the bird) is so strong that God is trying hard to reveal a new way to us. God is not in trouble, we are. God will be fine. God’s new revelation is as global as our computer’s screen. It is as local as our neighbor next door. It is profoundly glocal and will not be kept to the provincialization of any one religion. Christianity is just one religion.
E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and great humor writer, said it this way: “I wake up in the morning, wondering if I should save or savor the world. This makes it very hard for me to plan my day.” My confidence that God is issuing new information and new direction all the time is very helpful to me. It allows me to remove some of the weight of the world from my shoulders. Then you can plan a reasonable day. You can rest in a God that is in charge and not in an imperial way. God needs us! But we and the imperial God are not in charge. We are all in charge. That’s what it means that God became human, to show us the way.
Taking scripture seriously but not literally allows you to enjoy many stories not just one story. Becoming less triumphant means you too don’t have to win the personal Olympics, either just land the fall. There will be many falls along the way. Part of the One Universal Creator God way behind all the other gods is here. The new revelation will mean respect for all faiths, beyond the Thanksgiving service of the early interfaith years into a much more mature respect and knowledge of one another.
What’s wrong with my idea? One thing is that my American Black brothers and sisters won’t like it. They love their Jesus. My evangelical brothers and sisters won’t like it. They want to win the football game of denominationalism and sort of are if numbers matter. More Jesus, less Christ is not a perfect idea. It’s just an inkling of one.
Thank you, Christ the King Sunday, for showing up again and helping me get clear about the sheep and the goats and who belongs in which line. Amen.
Appendix TWO
The first amendment protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The fourteenth, ratified in 1868, requires states to guarantee fundamental rights such as the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion. This means that states, like the federal government, can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Appendix THREE
James Baldwin, one of many famous visitors to Greenwich Village, is said to have said in 1967: “We need to learn how to create a self without resorting to the borrowed power of an enemy.” In other words, say who you are rather than who you’re not. Or even better, refuse Jesus’ condemnation of sanctimony: Don’t tell me you’re not like other people. Instead tell me who you are like.
Appendix FOUR
In Freedom of the Pulpit: Its Implications, Limitations and Meaning, Lee C. Moorehead explores the concept of freedom of speech in the context of religious leaders and their sermons. The author discusses the historical and legal background of this freedom, as well as its limitations and implications for religious leaders. Moorehead argues that while freedom of speech is a fundamental right, it is not absolute and must be balanced with other rights and responsibilities. He examines the various limitations on freedom of speech, such as defamation, hate speech, and incitement to violence, and how they apply to religious leaders in their sermons. The author also explores the meaning of freedom of the pulpit, which he defines as the right of religious leaders to preach their beliefs without interference from the government or other outside forces. He discusses the importance of this freedom in maintaining the separation of church and state, as well as in promoting religious diversity and tolerance. Overall, Freedom of the Pulpit: Its Implications, Limitations and Meaning is a thought-provoking and insightful book that offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of freedom of speech in the context of religion. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of religion and politics, as well as for religious leaders who want to better understand their rights and responsibilities. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Appendix FIVE
In a tribute to Alexis Navalny, who is a Christian, Russell Moore quoted from a statement Navalny gave in 2021 when the judge offered him a last word. “If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation, I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up as an example, for constant ridicule in the anti-corrupt foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite militant atheist myself. But now I am a believer, and that helps me in a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much easier. I think about things less. There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am trying. And so, it’s easier for me, probably, than for many others, to engage in politics. “Blessed is those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied. Matthew 5:6 it’s not that I’m great, but I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity. And so, all certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back or about what I’m doing. It’s fine because I did the right thing. On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction, because in some difficult moment I did as require by the instructions and did not betray the commandment. For a modern person this whole commandment – – blessed, thirsty, hungry, for they shall be satisfied – – it sounds, of course, very pompous, sounds a little strange, to be honest. Well, people who say such things are supposed, frankly, speaking, to look crazy.”
The Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper is a rewired UCC and ABC pastor and author of www.removethepews.com