This morning's sermon at Highlands

The Old Testament tells us that because God had promised the land to Abraham, the invasion of the ancient Israelites was justified, even ordained. The first verses of the Book of Joshua tell the story.

After the death of Moses, the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister, "Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land which I am giving to them, to the people of Israel.

And Joshua the son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, "Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” And they went, and came into the house of a harlot whose name was Rahab, and lodged there.”

Rahab told the spies, "I know that the LORD has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you.”

Not long thereafter, we learn in Joshua 6:21 that “they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword.” And so, the brutal conquest of the land God promised had begun. And the LORD said to Joshua, "Do not fear or be dismayed; take all the fighting men with you, and arise, go up to Ai; see, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, and his people, his city, and his land; and you shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king; only its spoil and its cattle you shall take as booty for yourselves; lay an ambush against the city, behind it." 

So it was also that the Europeans like John Winthrop used this Old Testament story to inspire the first white people to come to the new world telling them … that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whither wee goe to possesse.

They came to this land with a sense that it too had been promised and that they had, therefore, a greater claim to it than those who had been here for centuries.

A Texas high school textbook teaches it differently. Let me read this note in the margins of a history text. “When the European settlers arrived here, they needed land to live on. The First Nation’s peoples agreed to move to different areas to make room for the new settlers.”

Turns out, we’ve been misleading students about these event for the entire history of the nation.

Tomorrow, this nation will once again celebrate the conquest on a day we call “Columbus Day.” This is the man we were falsely taught discovered America, the Columbus who reported to his benefactors that the Natives "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...."

He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Riches of gold and land were the motive. Christianity was the cover.


The Presbyterians and other faith communities have at long last apologized for our role in the conquest. Why? What do we have to apologize for? Just this. The conquest was carried out in the name of Christianity. Christian missionaries were on the frontlines as the land was taken and cultures stolen. That may be history, albeit not ancient history…but the truth is we are the continuing beneficiaries of all the evil that was dome to the first people to live where we now live our lives.

The homes we live in, the buildings in which we make our living, the school buildings in which our children and grandchildren learn, even the parks where we picnic and the churches in which we worship all sit, not on promised land, but on stolen land.

When we celebrate Columbus Day, we should at the least recognize we are the continuing beneficiaries of a conquest that darkens the hearts of people who divide this nation yet today by skin color. Ronald Takaki wrote a book titled “A Different Mirror.” In it he says, “Indians were already here, while blacks were forcibly transported to America, and Mexicans were initially enclosed by America’s expanding border.’ But whites came and redefined the land in a way that said to Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics, “You are not a part of it.”  

Fast forward through a sad history too long to chronicle during a 20-minute sermon, fast forward through the years when violence against the Indians was the same tool the Bible says the ancient Israelites used against the Canaanites and others to take the land and you will all too soon arrive at those days when the Presbyterians earned the responsibility to apologize and atone.

It was 1872. Indian agencies were appointed to various denominations, including Presbyterians to Christianize the Native Peoples. Each denomination supervised Indian boarding schools in their areas.

Native children were forcibly removed from their families, taken hundreds of miles from their homes. The first task was to take away their identity. Their hair was cut, and their traditional clothing replaced by European-style clothes. They were given Anglicized names and forbidden to speak their own language. Discipline included beatings, solitary confinement and sexual abuse. Instead of going home during the summer or on holidays, children were leased out to whites as menial laborers and forced to do labor for the schools.

 Living conditions were unhealthy and supplies and food were insufficient. Those who died were buried in mass graves, often located on school grounds. Presbyterians took part in that as they did in many of the evils visited upon Native Americans in the name of God and greed. The Presbyterian Church USA believes the time has come to apologize and there is no better time for that apology than on the eve of America’s celebration of Columbus.

Last year the General Assembly passed a resolution reading in part:

“The Presbyterian Church (USA) and its members apologize to United States citizens of Native American ancestry, both those within and beyond our denomination.

"Our burdens include dishonoring the depths of the struggles of Native American people and the richness of your gifts. Therefore, we confess to you that when our Presbyterian ancestors journeyed to this land within the last few centuries, we did not respect your own indigenous knowledges and epistemologies as valid.

Which is why church historian Michael Cassity said, “Christianity represented a direct assault on tribal beliefs, customs, and culture.” I’ve heard it said, “We didn’t do this, it’s old history. Why should we apologize. People need to get over it and move on.” But then there’s the bible story of Pharaoh.

The Pharaoh of Exodus was one of the most powerful evil doers in the world of the Bible, an Egyptian ruler who the Bibles teaches did not know Joseph and the good he had done for Egypt by helping to save that nation from a famine. The ungrateful Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites, tasking them with hard labor and abuse. 

But what was Pharaoh’s greatest sin? It was the sin of ingratitude for the great debt Egypt owed to those who had once saved the nation from starvation, which came before him and without which his reign would not have existed and now a people upon whose labor his kingdom was being built. Every one of his other sins, for which he and his people were punished by God, followed from his refusal to acknowledge a debt he inherited and benefited from. 

America’s first sin is its continuing failure to acknowledge debts our generation did not incur, debts having benefits which we inherited, unpaid debts allowing us to live far better, safer, healthier than do the Indians from whom we took land and culture.

James Baldwin who wrote “The Fire Next Time,” warned us that our ignorance of the sins we perpetrate in the name of God, of the conditions we create, our false innocence as beneficiaries of the evil, is our greatest sin.

As Presbyterians and Christians, as people who yet this day worship God on stolen land, as the beneficiaries of the wrongs done in the past and those born of those days and continuing, we can no longer claim to be ignorant of the sins perpetrated in the name of God, of the conditions in which our Native brothers and sisters live even as we continue to reap the benefits of those sins and we say as did the General Assembly of the PCUSA:

"In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ, our hearts and minds were closed to the value of your own  lifeways. We did not understand the full extent of the Gospel of Christ! We should have affirmed the commonality between your spirituality and our understanding that God’s sovereignty extends with length from East to West, with breadth from North to South, with depth throughout the Earth, and with height throughout the Sky and Heavens."

It is ironic indeed that we have been asked to donate blankets to the Tribal families at Wind River. Whites once sent blankets to reservations that were tainted with small pox to kill Native peoples.

These blankets are gifts of love, the first of what I hope will grow to the heights of our communion table by next Sunday. It speaks volumes that while we sleep in our warm beds on stolen land, there are fellow citizens living on the Wind River Reservation, Native Americans who cannot escape the winter winds and the ice-cold air coming through the cracks in the buildings in which they live.

They are asking us to donate warm clean, new or used blankets for the coming winter. They will be gathered and taken to Wind River on October 21, which means that next Sunday is the best time for you to bring them.

In the 4^th Chapter of the Book of Leviticus, God speak about sin offerings.

"If the whole congregation commits a sin unwittingly and the thing is hidden from the eyes of the assembly, and they do any one of the things which the LORD has commanded not to be done and are guilty; when the sin which they have committed becomes known, the assembly shall offer a young bull for a sin offering and bring it before the tent of meeting; 
These blankets are a sin offering for we and our ancestors have done things which the Lord has commanded not be done and our sins have now been made known to us and we offer warming blankets for a sin offering before the tent of the meeting.

If you believe that an apology is due, let’s begin with this gesture. As you bring blankets, place them on this altar, stacked high as a symbol of the atonement we seek to accompany the apology we have offered. In the name of the true God. AMEN