"Can We Move Beyond Tribalism?"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on April 27, 2008

Texts — Exodus 34:8-14 and Galatians 3:23-29

Our focus today — on one level — is the nation of Colombia. We have a sister-church partnership with a Lutheran Church in Ibague, Colombia.  Lyn Shaw and Howard Thody have both visited Colombia in recent years.

But our focus is also broader than Colombia alone. And as I said in the email preview I sent out, this is a dangerous sermon for any of you who might be running for President in the future. I can’t compare myself to Jeremiah Wright [the retired pastor of Barack Obama’s congregation, Trinity UCC in Chicago.]  I’m certainly not the preacher he is.  But on the other hand, he’s said some crazy stuff that I’d never say. The whole Jeremiah Wright flap shows that it doesn’t take much truth and honesty to throw a presidential campaign off track these days. But we’ll come back to that.

The war in Colombia has been a war among several armed factions. There are 2 aspects of this war that are especially relevant to us as Americans. 

The first is nacre-terrorism. One of the ways that the various armed groups in Colombia get money is through drug trafficking.  In the remote areas of Colombia, an armed group will forcibly remove people from their land so the army can grow coca beans and start a cocaine factory. If you’re the farmer whose land has been taken, this sort of activity pretty much destroys your life. 

And our government doesn’t like it either. The United States’ answer to this situation  so far — and this has been the approach of all recent presidents, of both parties — has been to pay the Colombia government to fly helicopters over the coca fields and spray poison. Presidents like that approach because it’s cheap, and it lets us say we’re fighting the war on drugs at its source.  Whether Colombia is the “source” of our drug problem is a question that would take a whole other sermon.

The Colombian government also likes that approach, because it’s cheap, and because it takes money away from their military enemies.

The trouble is, it also creates new enemies. When you spray poison from a helicopter, the poison doesn’t follow the property lines and just land on the coca plants. There’s usually a breeze blowing. So the poison gets blown onto other people’s property — farmers who were just minding their own business growing corn or coffee or some other legitimate crop. It also kills livestock, and those other crops, and pets, and gets into the water supply, and causes cancer in young children. There aren’t a lot of cancer treatment options in the mountains of Colombia.  You can see how all of this would tend to make the people of Colombia unhappy with our government’s policies.

4 million people in Colombia have been displaced from their homes and farms by this civil war and the war on drugs. Where do these displaced people go?  They’re at the mercy of people in different parts of Colombia, usually church communities, who aren’t rich, and don’t have a lot of surplus, but these church groups take in the displaced and give them food and shelter. And then the host churches become embroiled in the conflict and become targets themselves for giving refuge to people who are angry at the government. We’ve prayed for church pastors who have been kidnapped as a way terrorizing these communities as a way to try to keep them quiet, passive, and apolitical.

And there’s another commodity in Colombia that has also been known to influence U.S. foreign policy — oil. There’s a long oil pipeline. Our tax dollars pay the Colombian military to protect that pipeline, so that’s also a war zone. Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

Colombia doesn’t get a lot of press coverage these days. So the people of Colombia, especially our church partners in the Mennonite Church and Lutheran Church, are asking us, for this one day, to pay a little attention to them, to pray for them, and try to see the situation as they see it.

It’s easy for us to ignore Colombia. We all feel that we’re busy enough just doing what we have to do to keep our own lives together. These world problems are so far away, and so complex, and long-lasting. They feel beyond us, out of our range.

Which is another way of saying: We humans are tribal creatures. We’re social. We form close groups. We need familiar faces. We take care of our own friends and families before we think of doing anything for the sake of people a thousand miles away. That’s probably the way it needs to be, up to a point. 

Last Sunday, I went to the dedication of the new Cross Street AME Zion church.  What I always notice at African American churches and what I like about them is how they build each other up and cheer each other on.  They clap, they shout amen.  Everything is wonderful. Everyone is encouraged. That worship style has its roots in American slavery and the legacy of slavery. It’s no wonder that most African-Americans like to stick together on Sunday morning.

But group spirit is something we all need.  That’s tribalism in a good sense.  But tribalism also has a downside. Tribalism is human, but it’s also where the trouble begins. For example: We all want cheap oil, and we naturally tend to care less about people who live in oil producing nations, as long as the oil keeps coming. That has gotten us into trouble. We want cheap, high quality clothes and we tend to care less about the people in the sweatshops who make those clothes. That can get us into trouble too, like the loss of millions of U.S. jobs. We care about the drug problem when an addict breaks into our home, and we tend to care less about the family in Colombia whose land is poisoned. All of this seems obvious, and not very profound.

But isn’t it interesting that no presidential candidate would ever talk this way? The truth is, and this is the “dangerous” part, that people don’t become President by sympathizing with people in Colombia or the Middle East.  People become President by appealing to our tribalism, and inflaming it. 

Christianity — at least liberal Christianity, the kind we embrace here — could make a real contribution to the world. What if we really took seriously the idea that we are all God’s children?  Everyone says that, at least in church.  But imagine if large numbers of people actually acted that way.

We’re tribal. We thrive on tightly knit groups. We’re not going to change that. But there’s another side to our nature.  We also have the capacity to imagine how other people feel, even if we don’t know them personally.

It’s a small planet. It’s getting smaller. Our lives are increasingly interconnected. We’re all running out of fuel. The gap between the rich and the poor is getting worse. With technology, any angry person can do a lot of damage.  The climate is changing. We have to find a way to care about each other.

Treating other people as if they don’t count is not only un-Christian.  It doesn’t work in the long run, on any level. That was Jeremiah Wright’s point in his famous “the chickens are coming home to roost” sermon that got Barack Obama in so much trouble. Tribal boundaries, or national boundaries, or ethnic boundaries, or religious boundaries are not the highest thing. This is the point Paul was making in his letter to the Galatians. In Christ tribal boundaries disappear. 

Admittedly, the Christian Church itself doesn’t have a great record in this area. Churches are tribal too.  But that’s not all churches are called to be. Jesus teachings and actions were always in the direction of loving people who aren’t the easiest to love, or most convenient to love. He even told us to love our enemies. Is there anything more in the Spirit of Jesus Christ than that?

And yet, isn’t it pathetic that no presidential candidate could ever say that? Not because it’s a religious statement.  Candidates talk about their faith.  They couldn’t say it because it’s anti-tribal. He or she would be knocked out of the race as a pansy, or an America-hater. 

But most of us aren’t running for President.  So we have more freedom. What if we thought of our tribe as bigger?  What if we thought our highest human calling was to care about all living things — creation? Imagine a political climate in which a U.S. presidential candidate could dare to say, and get away with saying, such a scandalous thing as that!