Cora and Frank Trujillo and I just got back from a week at Seabeck family camp with members of University UCC and friends. The way this camp is set up, every morning after breakfast the kids go off to their kids’ program, and the adults walk up from the dining hall through cedars and by an open meadow to the meeting house to attend a series of lectures with a guest speaker. Our guest speaker for the week this year was a fellow named Fumi Tosu, who founded and helps run a Catholic Worker place in Portland called Dandelion House.
I knew I would want to share with you today some inkling of what Fumi had to say, but I didn’t know what he would say on his topic, which was “Mysticism and Resistance in an Age of Empire: Communal Practices for Building a More Beautiful World.” So I picked this reading a few weeks ago, and it definitely fits, but I will leave it to you to figure out how. I’m going to focus instead on Ephesians 6:12, which we referred to repeatedly throughout the week. Fumi is Catholic, and in the New Catholic Bible version we read this:
For we are not struggling against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, the powers, and the cosmic rulers of this present darkness, and against the spirits of evil in the heavens.
We’re looking at the Catholic version of this verse because the key words we kept referring to were “powers and principalities,” and our usual New Revised Standard Version chooses instead to say “rulers and authorities,” which has a different feel to it.
Fumi defined powers and principalities as all institutions, ideologies, systems, social and political powers, etc. Government, of course, falls into this category. So do companies and organizations—including churches. Fumi said that powers and principalities have their own identity apart from humans, and their primary goal is self-perpetuation. Exxon may say its primary goal is to extract fossil fuels and refine them so that people can drive their cars, fly their planes, and heat their homes. That may be its secondary goal, but its primary goal is survival.
Similarly, a church may say that its primary goal is to preach and teach the Gospel and to serve the members as well as the larger community in a way that is true to Christ’s teachings. But before it can do all that, it has to be surviving.
Self-perpetuation and the other goals may not be in conflict. But if they are, the goal of survival is going to force some hard choices, some sacrifices, and perhaps some moments where the principality can no longer do some of the things it says are its goal. Or it may force the principality to take some actions that aren’t very moral. For example, when Exxon’s own scientific researchers realized in the 1980s that fossil fuels were a prime contributor to climate change, the head honchos at Exxon buried that information and denied it, because it threatened the continued existence of that fossil fuel company. If a church budget is coming up short, the discussion may center around what can be cut. Can we cut donations to Community Lunch or to the UCC denomination? Can we cut the pastor’s emergency fund, which helps people eat or pay their utility bills or their rent? Do we cut the pastor’s hours, or some aspect of the music program, or the fellowship hour budget? And do these cuts help the church to survive with integrity, or just balance the budget for the moment?
It’s the same discussion with our public schools. Do we close some of our schools, and if so, which ones? There are huge budget shortfalls in the Seattle Public Schools; what needs to go? How do you decide, and who has to be sacrificed? What teachers and administrators get laid off?
We saw our national government do this last year with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Among many other cuts, DOGE cut US AID funds to strapped countries around the world, funds that had helped with basic healthcare and food supplies. Thousands upon thousands of people have died without these resources. That was the sacrifice. And I don’t just single out the current administration: every government has to make decisions that cost lives. On our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we celebrate that we have survived so long, but we’re still trying to figure out what it means to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, a land of liberty and justice for all. We say the words, but we’ve never lived up to them.
Religious institutions are also powers and principalities and can go astray. At the Temple in Jesus’ day, a poor widow put her last two cents into the Temple collection box. Jesus noted that she had given more than all the rest who put in great amounts of money, because she gave all she had. We often think she is so holy, but Jesus is actually pointing out that this is backwards. The Temple is supposed to be helping the widows and orphans, not grabbing their very last two cents. But it’s gotten caught up in the striving for money and has forgotten about the widows and orphans.
Similarly, the Church, capital C, throughout history has gotten carried away with its power and has done very human, very fallen, very un-Christ-like things. The Crusades, for example, where Christians went to war on “infidels” such as Jews and Muslims to grab the Holy Land for themselves. Jesus never said, “Please make war—often—in my name, and I will help you kick your enemies’ butts.” His own enemies sought his life. He didn’t fight them; he spoke his truth to them, and they were too uncomfortable with it. He valued human relationships and healing over empire, and this made them uncomfortable. They killed him on a cross, which was how the Empire made examples of those who dared to question the Empire’s power.
Fumi Tosu said that when powers and principalities become more self-serving than good, they serve death, they demand allegiance, and they keep their people “asleep.” Serving death might mean they demand some sacrifice of our life energy in ways that are not life-giving to us. Principalities demand allegiance and distract us from seeing that they’re sucking our lives away. They distract us from grief—grief at the state of the planet, grief that over 150 species go extinct every day, grief that babies are starving or dying from famine and preventable diseases because Empire wouldn’t help.
Perhaps you recall what happened after 9/11, when everyone was in shock and wanted to do something important to help with recovery or to prevent this kind of attack from ever happening again. There was a moment of global shock and compassion and unity, where people all over the world, including in Iraq, put signs in their windows that said, “Today we are all Americans.” The world was standing with us in our grief. Imagine what good that energy could have achieved. But our empire blew past that, missed that opportunity. Perhaps you wondered why people in other countries hated the U.S. so much that they would attack in this way. As a nation, we did not have that conversation. Do you remember what our president told us to do, when we were all ready to help? Go shopping. Keep the consumer empire going. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about this. And then we went to war, and 9/11, which had nothing to do with the war, was held up as an excuse, a reason, a justification. We were encouraged not to notice that lack of connection, to stay asleep.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that the word “woke” is mocked in some circles, that being “woke” to racism and LGBTQ rights and women’s rights and healthcare for all and climate change is not seen as a good thing. Go back to sleep, our empire tells us. Go back to sleep so that we can continue to steal your rights without you noticing, continue to mine sacred lands without you knowing, continue to torment the immigrants in detention concentration camps, or stalk them on the streets of our cities because their skin is brown or black. Don’t be woke. Be asleep.
Are powers and principalities inherently evil? Are we to shun power and have nothing to do with any powers or principalities? No. Powers and principalities can also be life-giving. Healthcare is a power and principality. I belong to Kaiser Permanente, which saved my life this spring. Am I going to walk away from that? No. This church is a power and principality. I hope it is life-giving to you. Are we going to disband this congregation because it’s a principality, because it has some power? No. It may disband eventually, but not because it’s a principality.
So what are we to do, knowing that there are powers and principalities out there that have their own survival at heart more than their employees or their citizens or the people they serve?
Let’s hear the theme of Seabeck week again: “Mysticism and Resistance in an Age of Empire: Communal Practices for Building a More Beautiful World.”
If you’re thinking that mysticism means something very woo-woo, Fumi broke it down in some concrete ways. He described five doorways to mysticism:
All of these are ways in which we are pulled into something larger than ourselves, whether that is community or God or whatever. We may have a mystical longing for God, for truth, beauty, universal justice. When we achieve mystical union with God, we see not through our own eyes, but with the eyes of God. This is what Jesus did, and it freaked out the Pharisees.
And when we truly practice connection with God through religious experience or the arts or nature or suffering or service or living in monastic community, we may find the vision to see injustice and the will and strength to make choices around that.
Gandhi was not a Christian but was a deeply religious and nonviolent man who, as we recall, organized the people of India to throw off the oppressive colonialism of England. He used a term called Satyagraha, meaning clinging to truth, truth-force, soul-force, love-force, ultimate law of the universe. And working on Satyagraha had three components:
So direct action against injustice, construct the world you want to see, and work on spiritual practices to really ground yourself. Other ways of describing these steps are block, build, and be; or resistance, relationship, and reverence.
You may recall the image of Gandhi sitting with a simple spinning wheel. This spinning wheel embodied all three steps at once. England took the cotton that India grew, processed it in English textile mills, and then sold it back to the people of India. Gandhi said, What if everyone in India spent an hour a day spinning their own cotton instead of sending it to England? We would interrupt the colonial powers and principalities because they wouldn’t have our cotton, we would make our own textiles for our own use, and the spinning itself gets into a rhythm and can become a meditative spiritual practice. Block, build, be.
I’m not saying we all have to start spinning cotton. But we can live with open eyes, seeing the world through God’s eyes, taking steps against oppression, building the world we want to see, and centering our spirit in God. We can center human relationships instead of corporate ones.
What injustices are you willing to resist? What vision do you have for the world you’d like to see? What spiritual practices would ground you, giving you the strength and insight to see with God’s eyes? We have power. Power is not in itself a dirty word. Let us use our power to create and live into the world we want to see. Amen.