The Country We're Living In.

I heard a story about a young Black woman, just after the 2016 election, very disappointed about the results, bitterly complaining to her mother, who just shook her head, and said, "Did you forget what country you're living in?"

As an old white guy I am continually having to learn what country I am living in.  It is not the same country as Americans who are Black, Latino, or Indigenous, or women, or LGBT.  But my reaction of surprise and righteous indignation to the Rittenhouse verdict shows that I am not over this expectation that America is about "liberty and justice for all."  I continually tend to forget that I am really living in a country in which a white boy with an illegally obtained gun is able with impunity to enter a city and kill unarmed people whom he claims "threaten" him. 

I have been reading Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste, about race relations in the United States over the last four centuries.  It is so full of horrendous and tragic stories that I can only get through a few pages at a time before having to pause from heartbreak and nausea over the casual cruelties inflicted on Black Americans by white people enforcing their supremacy.   

Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised, like when a jury in Georgia actually convicted three white men who murdered an unarmed Black man whom they claimed "threatened" them.  That would most certainly not have happened 50, or even 10, years ago.  (Indeed, it almost didn't happen this time as the DA failed to take up the case until forced by a viral video to do so.)

People pining for "the way it was" and hoping to restore American "greatness" need to open their eyes and look at what was actually happening back then.  All this sordid and violent injustice and abuse was effectively hidden from comfortable, privileged, white people, who were able to live in an imaginary wholesome country characterized by piety, patriotism, prosperity, peace, and nice, happy families.

I have heard about this country from people in every church I served over the last 40 years.  The nostalgia for it and the anger over its "loss," and identifying people to blame, and the fear of a lawless, chaotic future (featuring prominent non-white people) was often palpable.  Indeed, only recently someone mentioned to me how good it is that the local school is once again going to celebrate Columbus Day.  Because forcing children to learn lies will somehow make America more comfortable for white people, I guess.  

That self-righteous longing for a time when we innocently feasted on the produce of oppression is utterly opposed to the Spirit and Word of God.  It has kept the Church crippled and separated from her Lord for centuries.  It is the most effective and debilitating barrier to discipleship.  Indeed, it sullenly and petulantly gives the finger to Jesus Christ, who explicitly identifies with the people who were systematically brutalized and exploited to feed our pathological, rosy delusions about White Christian America.            

The thing is, the more we realize that the country we are living in is founded on and sustained by injustice and violence against Native, African, and poor people, not to mention the Earth itself, the more we find ourselves able to understand the Bible better.  Because the Bible was written by, for, and to people who knew oppression, injustice, violence, marginalization, and defeat.  And if we do not read it from that perspective we don't understand it at all.  

Repentance means waking up to the truth about what country we are really living in... and at the same time becoming aware of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God that the Lord Jesus announces.  The true greatness of a nation is found, not in the fantasies it tells itself and enforces with cruelty and carelessness, but, he says, in justice and equity, compassion and forgiveness, simplicity and sharing, inclusion and kindness.

That Kingdom is waiting to emerge among us.  But that won't happen for us as long as we remain narcotized in self-serving lies about what country we're living in.  Those lies will continue to crumble and collapse.  We can be pointlessly angry about that.  Or we can look for the new heaven and a new earth as it emerges with, within, and among us. 

+++++++

The Virgin Birth Is True… Whether It Happened or Not.

A couple of Decembers ago, in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof interviewed William Lane Craig about the Virgin Birth.  Craig is a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University.  His entire response was to say that it really happened, and to point out the historical sources: Matthew and Luke.

I rolled my eyes in frustration.  Claiming that the Virgin Birth “really happened” neutralizes it into the absolute irrelevance of a distant historical event which means nothing to us today.  It is an artifact, and nothing more.  It is merely asserted to have happened by some smug, self-righteous, credulous Christians.  As if deciding that it happened is all that matters.

The “did it really happen” argument is pointless because there is no way to answer it.  Even if proof could be available one way or the other, it misses the meaning of the stories.  Indeed, I wonder if the real point of historical arguments isn’t to neutralize and deflate the truth.  

For deeper and higher truths 

may only be communicated by means of 

myth, story, image, symbol, ritual, metaphor, and poetry; 

we don't find them in history.  

These are exactly the means of discourse that Modernity has ruled out of hand as lies, superstition, fiction, and fairy-tales.  (Actually, even many fairy-tales communicate truth to us more effectively than a lot of historical analyses.)

To reduce a story to mere history is to kill it.  It is to render it a dead past event, something dissectible and disposable.  The demythologizing project of Modernity was always intended to undercut truth, so that self-serving propaganda may be inserted in its place.  And the most effective way to do that is to evaluate a story based on its “historicity.”  Thus the “did it really happen” question is taken for the only measure of truth… and it just so happens that it is unanswerable.  In this way the Modern Age systematically replaced truth with fake news.  That is, we devalued the myths and stories that convey truth to us, and replaced it with the glorified advertising copy which often passes for historical analysis.  What we call history — and often science — is always filtered through the subjective, ego-centric, thoroughly biased consciousness of the observer.  In the end it’s all entertainment. 

Once we have hit the impasse of, “yes, it did happen,” vs. “no, it couldn’t have happened,” we have nowhere else to go.  And we have failed to listen to the story itself.   

In terms of the Virgin Birth, it is not about history or gynecology.  One person who understood the story well was 19th century anti-slavery activist, Sojourner Truth.  When challenged by male religious professionals who attempted to silence her, she pointed to the story of the Virgin Birth.  Christ comes into the world by God and a woman, she said; a man had nothing to do with him.  Therefore, one meaning of the story is that God’s entry into the world is an explicit contradiction of a world order that privileges maleness.  It is an inherently anti-patriarchy narrative. 

And that’s just one political meaning of the story.  There are meanings that go even deeper into human consciousness and destiny.  Meister Eckhart talked about how it shows God being born in each of us.  Karl Barth noted that it tells us that humans do not have the power to bring God into the world.  And then there is the whole question of the Incarnation, and its meaning in terms of the relation of Creator to creation.  “God became human so that humans might become God,” is the way the early Christians talked about it.

And so on.  All of which is lost if we focus exclusively on the tiny, pointless, and unanswerable question of whether it "actually happened" or not.  

Caving in and allowing the Modern world to define truth for us is what is killing faith and the planet.  I used to think that Christianity was courageous for applying historical analysis to its core documents and history.  Maybe.  Certainly we may have gained a lot of helpful knowledge about the context of the Scriptures.  Certainly we have liberated the gospel from some forms of self-serving institutional oppression.  But at the same time we have lost way too much in this exchange.  And too often what we were left with was even worse, if more subtle, forms of institutional oppression.  

Fortunately, we did not lose the stories themselves.  In spite of attempts to extract and dissect, slice and resect pieces of the Scriptures, the texts remain.  And the faith remains.  Because in the end reality wins.  Truth is.  Propaganda, fake news, advertising, and “history” all collapse for lack of any purchase in reality.  But the Word of the Lord endures forever.  (It is not by accident that the attitude of some scholars to the text is identical to the way the petrochemical industry comes at the planet:  Extract, waste, consume, and profit.)

The late Phyllis Tickle related how she once talked about the Virgin Birth story at a conference.  One of the young servers at the hotel overheard her, and approached her later to observe that the Virgin Birth story is “too beautiful not to be true, whether it happened or not.”

Exactly. 

+++++++   

 

 

Following Jesus Means Following Jesus.

It seems to me that some Christians don't really follow Jesus.  I have seen bizarre and disgraceful renditions of a white "Jesus" who somehow hates Gays and loves guns, who is wrapped in an American flag and voted for Trump, who despises immigrants and endorses capitalism, who opposes publicly-funded healthcare and vaccines.  The Jesus of some appears to be just a name for the sponsor of the White Christian America they mistake for Christianity.

None of that expresses the Jesus we find in the gospels, who famously (among other things) fed, healed, and liberated people purely on the basis on need and all for free, criticized the wealthy, welcomed the outcast and strangers (ie. migrants), and advocated forgiveness and non-violence.  That Jesus was arrested and executed by the State (ie. police), acting on behalf of the political, economic, and religious establishment.

At the same time, there are also Christians at the other end of the ideological spectrum who seem to do basically the same thing: invent a Jesus different from the one in the gospels in order to serve their political and social biases and goals. 

For instance, they apply arbitrary scientific criteria to invent a "historical Jesus" distinct from the Jesus of the gospels, and thereby decide that he "didn't really say" words that the gospels indicate he did.  In the process, they have to cut many pieces out of the gospels, and get rid of almost the whole gospel of John.  Their theory is that the Church (even though it was founded by people who knew Jesus personally) misunderstood and deliberately corrupted and misinterpreted his original teachings, and that by their own methodology (developed and perfected in German secular universities in the 19th century) only they, at a remove of 2000 years, somehow finally manage to recover the real and pure historical Jesus.  

Unsurprisingly, their new "Jesus" appears designed to offend or disturb the people they disagree with.  For instance, he is non-apocalyptic and he does not make any claims to divinity.  Coincidentally, these are things they didn't like about Christianity to begin with.  And, of course, he doesn't do anything that sophisticated Modern people would consider "supernatural."   

It is important to note at this point that these two false "Jesuses" are not equivalent!  The arrogant, AR-15 wielding, redneck "Jesus" of the right is hateful, bigoted, and violent, and therefore far more egregious than the vague hippie philosopher "Jesus" of the left, who is basically harmless and easily ignored (which is the point).  But while one approach ignores or radically reframes the Jesus of the text; the other attacks the integrity of the text itself.  Which is worse, I wonder?  

If we are going to follow Jesus we must decide whether we are going to follow the actual Jesus as attested in the New Testament, as inconvenient, annoying, and difficult as that may be), or some other "Jesus" that allows us to remain stuck in our comfort zone, legitimating our own fear, anger, desire, ratifying everything we already believe, know, and follow.  If we just invent a "Jesus" that suits us -- no matter how sophisticated our methodology -- then what we are really obeying is our own ego.  We're using "Jesus" as an excuse and blessing to do as we please.

Let's be clear here.  The only Jesus that matters to people truly seeking to follow him is the one found in the New Testament.  Following means obedience.  It means setting our individual egocentric agenda aside, which takes a lot of strenuous spiritual work.  In short, the actual Jesus of the New Testament is about transformation.  Indeed, it is to avoid the demands of this Jesus that we dream up less threatening ones to worship.

How do we know if the Jesus we follow is the real one?  Hint: It's not the one who vindicates us.  The real Jesus calls on us to change, and not just in a technical or even adaptive way.  "When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die," is how Bonhoeffer put it.  We have to lose our selves.  If we are privileged and powerful we need to let that all go.  At the same time, if we are broken and enslaved, then that identity is what he calls on us to relinquish.  If the Jesus of Scripture isn't sticking in our face a fundamental existential challenge, we are probably not encountering him at all.  He comes to turn our lives, and the world, upside down.  

The point is that we start to emerge with his mind and in his Image.  We have to resonate with the Jesus we are given in Scripture.  Conformity to him is all that matters, personally and in terms of the whole world.  We begin living in what he called the Kingdom of God, a complex of relationships and practices distinct from what we want or are used to.

But this depends on not following any "Jesus" other than the one in the New Testament.

+++++++

"The Most Plausible Perjury."

In spite of the fact that everyone who testifies in court is required to place their hand on a Bible (What is that about anyway?  Why do they use our book?) and swear to tell "the truth," the general consensus among lawyers I consulted was that nobody tells the truth in court.  One attorney candidly confessed that what judges and juries have to come up with when assessing testimony is "the most plausible perjury."

In other words, they assume that everyone is lying and that the best outcome is basically whatever story makes the most sense to whomever is making the decision.  If the decision-makers are not particularly self-aware -- and, believe me, judges are at least as impaired by self-serving delusions as people who have no power at all -- then their decisions are fatally infected by self-interest.  That is, they will go with whatever appeals to their desire, fear, and anger, whatever story buttresses their thinking about the world, serves their personal and professional goals, and places them in the best light.  The decision that gets made ends up being the one that makes them feel best.

This is the way we are increasingly making all our decisions.  When Ronald Reagan asked voters whether they were "better off," he stated what became the basic criterion for everything.  He inadvertently echoed the 60's mantra, "If it feels good, do it!"  It's all about feelings.  If it feels true it must be true.  This is how we determine what is plausible: what feels right to us.   

If truth is reduced to feelings, facts don't matter.  Facts have in fact been shown to be susceptible to spinning and interpretation.  The data and statistics we are willing to accept are dependent on how we feel about them.  Experts know how to present "facts" in such a way as to incite particular feelings.  And feelings are often based on perceived consequences of our actions and decisions.      

If I am not happy with the state of the world, I can look for someone to blame.  I can immerse myself in grievances and resentments.  As if all facts are equal and I get to choose the ones I want to use to cobble together a story that makes sense to me, that is, that makes me feel good: vindicated, comforted, righteous, pious, responsible.

Some States are passing laws that don't allow schools to teach history that makes some white people feel bad.  The facts don't matter.  Feelings matter... and only the feelings of white people.  Stories that make Black people feel bad are fine, apparently, which makes this a deeply political matter, with the loudest and most obnoxious group getting to have their story maintained, and their feelings catered to, at everyone else's expense.  

Feelings are therefore the result of a calculus of consequences, like the Pharisees trying to answer Jesus' question about whether John the Baptizer was from God or not.  "If we say this then that will happen, and if we say that then this will happen," so, unable to choose between two uncomfortable outcomes, they decided to say they didn't know.  

Is truth based on the anticipated consequences and how we feel about them?  This attitude leads us to deny facts that don't suit us, like the global climate crisis.  This is what chairman Mao was thinking when he caused a famine by trying to set agricultural policy according to his political ideology.  This is what Donald Trump is doing with his persistent lies about the 2020 election.  As if things can't be true if they do not gratify our self-image.  

We read the Bible this way as well.  Too often the Bible is just like the Mirror of Erised in the Harry Potter books, reflecting our own desires, showing us what we want to be.  This is how people at opposite extremes on socio-economic-political spectrums can manage to wield the Bible supposedly in their own favor.  We assume that Scripture and the Church exist to make us feel good (and someone else feel bad, usually people we don't like).  This is true of liberals as well as conservatives.  We expect the text to just reflect back to us what we want, and if it doesn't do this to our satisfaction, we ignore, change, or marginalize the parts that don't serve us.

We're not going to get to the truth unless we care more about the truth than we do about self-gratification.  That is already a difficult ask.  It demands a complete change of our way of thinking.  Scripture refers to this as repentance: metanoia, attaining a new mind.  

Our egocentricity is so profound in us that it taints and colors everything we perceive and every decision we make.  Spiritual maturity is learning to recognize this and let go of it, which is a very painful process.  Jesus calls it giving up your life and self and taking up your cross.  But every faith tradition in the world has something like it.  It is the beginning insight of the Enneagram, for instance, that we are distorted by personality.  

If we continue to muddle and crash through our existence, unconsciously following what we self-servingly determine to be the most plausible facts, adhering to false narratives and the strategies based on them, we will continue to wreak damage in all our relationships and therefore on the whole world.  Perjury is still a lie even if we imagine it to be plausible.

I'm not saying that the truth is always something uncomfortable, inconvenient, and difficult that we don't want to hear about.  But frankly a large part of the time it is.  And it's not like everything uncomfortable, inconvenient, and difficult is true.  But we do have to put some effort and attention into discernment, and realize that the truth is very likely to challenge our self-image.  It is likely not to be something we want to hear.

But the truth is, in the end, good news because following gratifying falsehoods eventually leads to death and disaster.  Like diving out a 7th story window because you feel like you should be able to fly.  Or going barefoot in February because you feel like it should always be summer.  The thing about truth is that it always wins. 

We don't have much time at this point.  We are wrecking things at too fast a pace.  We need to follow the truth asap.  This means following Jesus, who is the Truth, and his Way of non-violence, compassion, humility, inclusion, forgiveness, service, healing, justice, and love. 

+++++++

 

    

The Long Defeat.

 

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory. 

—J. R. R. Tolkien, (Letters 255).

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

—Tertullian

First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.  Then they fight you.  They they kill you.  Then you win.

—Attributed to Gandhi, paraphrasing labor activist Nicholas Klein

How can we look at history, especially the last century or so, and think otherwise than that Tolkien is right: human history is a long defeat?  Indeed, how can we hear about some events even of just the last couple of weeks, and not deeply mistrust the idea that things just keep getting better?  Ignorance and lies triumph in our politics.  Greed and exploitation characterize our economy.  (Even in sports, the winning team features a racist hand gesture.)  Martin Luther King said that the arch of history is long but it bends towards justice; sometimes it is quite exhausting and depressing to live in that bending.  

The opposite of the long defeat is Modernity’s ideology of progress.  And I admit that part of me would occasionally still harbor some hope that people would wise up, that through education, democracy, technology, and spiritual development we could build a better world for all.  But this is the lie we in the Western world are fed from birth.  For a time in our history, at the peak of European power at the end of the 19th century, it must have looked true, from the perspective of the comfortable victors.  History surely seemed like one triumphant advance after another.  

Now I am sure that this was just our white privilege showing.  It is easier to believe that things will always improve if the world is skewed to our benefit through the ruthless application of colonialism, capitalism, and militarism.  We can maintain the illusion of progress if billions of humans are forced to work to keep it seeming real for us.  Adam Smith can be amazed at the magical Invisible Hand creating prosperity, only because he was blind to the very Visible Fist that pounded wealth from the forced labor of millions in factories and colonies.  We have this smug and complacent expectation that the system will continue to keep us in the comfort to which we have become accustomed.  The truth is that Modern progress was all a product of exploitation and violence.  

The alternative to seeing things in terms of progress is to see apocalyptically.  This is the framework of the Bible.  It is where Tolkien’s view of the “long defeat” comes from.  Tolkien also mentions there are those “samples or glimpses of final victory” that do occur.   The Book of Revelation tells us that empires do a lot of damage in the course of inevitably and spectacularly disintegrating, but God’s truth emerges in the end.  That victory is the point.  And that is really important: the long defeat resolves in the ultimate triumph of truth and goodness.  

The only sense in which progress is real is as the way we live into this final victory, trusting in the “samples or glimpses” of it that we experience now.  In that trust we learn to follow Jesus.  And we may make progress, improve, and evolve, over time.   We can advance, as Paul says, from milk to solid food.  This is the progress of discipleship.  We grow into Christ; Christ emerges in us.  “Perfection consists in our never stopping in our growth in good,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa.

So amid this long defeat, we remain faithful to Jesus' life and justice.  We obey his commandments, which are all about love.  We witness to the truth revealed in him, in his ministry, his crucifixion and resurrection.  The world doesn’t necessarily get any better… but we do.  We grow into the mind of Christ.  We let go of our old selves, renouncing in Baptism “the ways of sin that separate us from the love of God.”  That is all we are responsible for, but it “demands my soul, my life, my all,” to quote a classic hymn.

Discipleship may or may not improve the world beyond our little corner of it.  (But it does improve our corner!)  That doesn’t matter.  We cherish no expectations in that regard.  The world as God made it is already a better place than we know; we just don’t see it… until we start living in the gentle and fragile light of those “samples” and “glimpses” of the victory.  So only discipleship matters.  It is what we have to do during the long defeat.

Jesus healed people.  He freed them from bondage.  He fed the hungry.  He welcomed and accepted the marginalized and outcast.  He commanded his followers to forgive without limit.  He said many things that mortally offended the religious, political, and economic establishment.  That’s why discipleship has to include what we call “political” work; it has to be expressed in the way we live together in communities, from the household to the world.  Feeding the hungry also means seeking to change or replace the sinful systems that cause inequalities and injustices in the first place. 

The final victory, as experienced in those “samples” and “glimpses,” is in a sense already here, among and within us.  Jesus proclaimed it at the beginning of his ministry (Mark 1:15).  The final victory is embedded and encoded in creation itself by the Creator, and in each and all of us.  It is always Present.  In the Church we seek to live together in conformity with the ultimate triumph of God.

In the movie, The Candidate, a political operator tries to convince Robert Redford, a community organizer, to run for the U. S. Senate.  He is reticent to do it until the consultant writes on the back of a matchbook the secret of a successful campaign:  “You lose.”  It is the renunciation of any expectation of winning that gives him the freedom to get his message out.  (And of course in the end he wins.)  

It is like this for the Lord Jesus.  He knew that what he was headed for in Jerusalem was an ignominious defeat, before rising on the third day.  And it is like this for the community of his disciples.  We are engaged in a long defeat.  We are going to lose battle after battle.  We are after all not fighting against flesh and blood but principalities and powers of darkness that have a grip on people, feeding their fear, shame, and anger, inciting violence and bigotry, ignorance and lies, spawning injustice, war, and ecological catastrophe.   

Our word for this defeat is martyrdom, which literally means “witness.”  We are called to witness, amid the long disintegration, to the truth of God’s love for the whole world, by expressing that love for others after Jesus' example.  In the final victory of his resurrection, we stand firm in or conviction that love always wins, in the end.

+++++++

       

      

Killing Barney.

When my son was about 5 or 6 I took him to a minor league baseball game in Somerville, NJ.  During the game, between two half-innings, someone dressed as a purple dinosaur danced out onto the field while the Barney Song (“I love you, you love me…”) played over the PA.  My son was getting a little old for Barney, but he had watched a lot of these shows only a year or two earlier.  So he lit up and pointed the figure out to me, smiling.

I don’t know if he is still on TV, but Barney was a character in children’s television.  His show was for little kids and it was about being nice and caring for each other.  He was surrounded by a diverse set of children who danced, sang, and played with him.  It was good.  

Then, at the stadium, as the dinosaur cavorted near second base, there was the recorded report of a rifle shot, and Barney went down in a heap.  The people laughed and cheered.

My son wasn’t traumatized.  But he was shocked and surprised.  He knew it was fake.  But he turned to me with this quizzical and sad look on his face.  “Why did they kill Barney, dad?  And why does everyone think it’s funny?”  

What was I supposed to answer?  “I don’t know, Dan.”  I said.  “People are nasty sometimes.”  

That was pretty lame, I know.  How do you break it to a 5-year-old that he is  entering into a society that thinks of innocence, goodness, and joy as things to be exterminated with glee.  I mean, it could easily have been Mr. Rogers they had assassinated.  (“Owning the libs” is the term for this kind of thing these days.)

(My son “advanced” to Power Rangers around this time.  Nobody messed with them.)

I find it difficult not to be cynical about America right now, and about the human race generally.  Much of our politics continues to be perverted by a buffoon who thrived on ignorance, cruelty, and lies, and who seems to be enthusiastically adored by at least a third of our people.

The latest novel by Richard Powers is Bewilderment.  It describes the journey of a widower and his 10-year-old son through contemporary America.  The boy is very concerned about extinction and other aspects of our ecological crisis.  He keeps getting met with ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  When he asks his dad about this, the protagonist occasionally just has to throw up his hands, shake his head, and say, “Humans.”

I get it.  

In Glasgow right now our leaders are gathered again to address the catastrophic heating of the planetary atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.  They are making dire speeches, which is at least better than denying the crisis altogether.  But I suspect the results will be the same.  Too little, too late, if anything.  Our political and economic structures are not designed to deal with this kind of rolling catastrophe.  They are designed for ignorance, cruelty, and lies, mainly.  They are designed to make rich people richer.  They can’t be used for anything else any more than my car can turn into an oak tree.

Humans.

What can we do?  Complain to the authorities: there was no reason to kill Barney?  Like that’ll work?  Someone in an office somewhere was paid to come up with that idea.  He no doubt thought it would be hilarious.  For many he was right.  

I still believe, that is, I trust in God, which means that I know that beneath it all, at the very foundation of reality, is love.  And that what we are seeing now is merely the messy disintegration of our ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  They collapse on themselves with great fanfare and cost.  It’s very painful and violent.  It’s analogous to overcoming an addiction, except as a whole civilization.

I sense that God will not allow the creation to go down.  Our civilization?  That’s another story.

Yet love remains, within everything.  In the Voice of the Creator who called it all into being.  

Maybe we would see that, if we saw through the eyes of a child who was not yet jaded and corrupted by ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  Who was still open to something real.  Still open to the truth.  Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said we get into the Kingdom of God only as children.  As people who have yet to be indoctrinated into the regime of ignorance, cruelty, and lies.

“This is my beloved Son.  Listen to him.”

+++++++

The Shinnecock Witness.

There is an Indian reservation on Long Island.  It has been there since the 18th century.  But the people have been there, on that very land, for thousands of years.  

The reservation is in the middle of The Hamptons, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the world, with expansive multi-million dollar houses all over the place, with manicured lawns maintained behind high hedges.  

The indigenous Shinnecock people are not wealthy.  Sixty percent of them live below the poverty line; some have no running water and many dwell in housing that is substandard in other ways.  Substance abuse is a continuing crisis, as is unemployment.    

They were originally allowed a 3600 acre reservation… but since 1859 much of this land has been gradually (and illegally) appropriated by wealthy white people, who devoted it to railroads, highways, developments, and a very fancy golf course (built on ancient burial grounds).  The current de facto reservation is a fraction of that, almost all on a single peninsula in Shinnecock Bay.

There are in the world a few inflection points where the collision between settler colonialism and indigenous peoples, is particularly acute.  Palestine is one of them.  Shinnecock is another.

The Shinnecock Nation is a hold-out of life against the spreading, corrosive cancer of a money-grubbing, polluting, thieving, arrogant white supremacy that treats everything and everyone as a commodity to be extracted, used up, and converted into private wealth and toxic waste.  There is no way to look positively upon the garish monstrosities that consume the land, poison the water, and exploit underpaid labor in The Hamptons.  The Shinnecocks are making a stand in favor of living simply in harmony with creation*, and against an insatiable machine of unmitigated evil devouring everything in its path.

The big difference here is world-views, and it is, in my opinion, the basis for centuries of mis-communication and one-sided violence.  The two groups see time and creation from opposite perspectives.  The modern, white people see God’s creation in terms of  “resources” to be exploited, which is to say, turned by force into private wealth.  And they see time in a similar way, apparently believing that it only began in 1639 when the forces of European “progress” arrived.  Everything prior to that is all but nonexistent, as is anyone not participating in their metanarrative of privilege and “development.”  Most of all, the English brought with them a corrosive individualism that severely devalued and even negated all senses of community, from creation to the family.  For the settlers, only individuals exist, with priority given to the rich and powerful.  Upon this assumption we have based all our law, religion, morality, and values.  

The Shinnecock people, on the other hand, see reality in terms of communities and wholes.  The land is held by the tribe (which makes even having street addresses problematic for white institutions).  And they see their ancestors as still part of their community, which is why disturbing their resting places is so offensive to them.  They understand themselves to be part of a larger community of creation itself, including the land, the sea, the animals, and others.  

And they don’t particularly care about money.  Each one of them would instantly become wildly wealthy were the tribe to sell their land and split the proceeds among the members.  For white people this refusal is utterly incomprehensible.  It seems insane to them.  They intuitively realize it is a judgment on their own reflexive greed, and they react with fear, anger, and hatred.

To Christians, the Shinnecock people present a challenge.  Because it is absurdly evident that indigenous peoples live in a way close to that of Jesus Christ, who owned almost nothing, walked lightly on the Earth perceiving God in nature, founded inclusive communities, and was subject to the tyranny of both reactionary religion and colonialist laws.  We who claim the name of Christ, on the other hand, too often find ways to rationalize and justify the continued abuse of God’s creation and poor, indigenous, and working people.

The racist and individualist “values” of settler colonialism run so deep in our European DNA that the words of the gospel are often quite opaque to us. 

At this point abandoning those habits of thought and action would necessarily demand a change in the very way we think.  More importantly, it would mean a thorough and comprehensive reassessment of everything about the character of the presence of Europeans in this hemisphere at all.  In other words, repentance.  Metanoia.  

Not that there is any going back.  But we will have to find a way forward that is more just and humane than the steamrolled highway that brought us to this sad, degraded point in history.  I am not just talking about this particular case, or even of indigenous rights in general.  The same regime that is oppressing the Shinnecocks is also kicking the whole atmosphere of the Earth out of balance, generating a global rat’s nest of crises from wildfires and massive floods, to increasingly frequent and severe storms, to a rise in refugees… and what we are now experiencing is just the beginning.

We need, in short, to follow Jesus and is Way of humility, simplicity, community, and healing.  In other words, we need humbly to learn from, and be more like, indigenous peoples.  

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Advice for PNC's.

1. A church may seek to appeal to younger people.  Or it may preserve its traditions.  It cannot do both.  Stop asking your prospective pastors to do the impossible.

2. Do not claim to “welcome everyone” unless you really do welcome everyone.

3. Forget about “young families” if by that you mean cis-hetero married couples under 35 with biological offspring.  They mostly don’t exist.

4. Forget about bringing back people who have left the church.  It is extremely unlikely that they are coming back.

5. Do not include the date of your church’s founding in your MIF.  Nobody cares except that it measures how out of touch you are.

6. Stop expecting your pastor to have “office hours.” 

7. Stop expecting your pastor to visit people in their homes except in emergencies.

8. Giving small amounts of money to a wide variety of local social service agencies is not “mission.”

9. Do not ask that your pastor be a “change agent” unless you can say with great specificity what that means.
10. When you are contacting a candidate, clearly identify your town and State. Just saying you're from "First Church" is not helpful. 

Reformation Sunday.

Reformation Day is October 31, commemorating the date in 1517 when Martin Luther hammered his 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, sparking the Reformation.  This year it falls on this coming Sunday.

Early in my career I thought this a cool time to remember our Protestant history.  Invariably we would sing Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and stress the doctrines and approaches that became characteristic of Protestantism.

But eventually I got frustrated with that approach.  If we sink too much energy into looking back, we don’t have much left for what is going on now.  We can’t imagine that the Church was reformed back then and that everything has been fine ever since.  If we pay too much attention to the 16th century, we lose sight of both the original revelation and Christ’s continued Presence.  

I remember my grandfather telling me how, in that hymn, “the Prince of Darkness grim” was supposed to refer to the Pope, who, at the time, was waging war against Luther’s followers.  Later I learned that the hymn was used by the Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s, and they understood the Prince of Darkness to be Hitler.  When I began my ministry in 1981, I went to a clergy retreat led by Christian ethicist, Paul Lehmann.  He suggested that that title might be applied as well to the new President at the time, who was embarking on a program of injustice and predatory economics from which we have yet to recover, 40 years later.  Still more recently, we have had a leader whose cynical greed and lying knew no bounds, who instigated a murderous insurrection, undermined a legitimate election, botched our response to a deadly pandemic, and continues to retain millions of devotees.

My point is that we can’t reduce Reformation Day to a historical artifact.  Some of the dynamics that pertained back then persist in every generation and even today.  Tyranny, greed, ignorance, lies, and violence assault the Church all the time; the Holy Spirit is always reforming the people of God according to God’s Word, Jesus Christ.

Neither can we continue to harp on the theological issues that were at stake in the 16th century.  They became less relevant with each passing decade, until now, it is hard to generate any energy over things like “sola scriptura,” “salvation by grace through faith,” or “the priesthood of all believers.”  Not that these didn’t have elements of truth which needed lifting up and defending at that time.  But not only can undue attention to these questions unnecessarily divide Christians today, but it can be a distraction from the issues that the Spirit is calling us to address now.

For instance, Luther’s action has fed into the Modern mythology about the courageous outlaw individual who bucks the system to become successful doing his own thing.  His interpretation of the conflict between law and grace has been used to justify virulent pathologies from anti-semitism to the “cheap grace” that (Lutheran) Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw was neutralizing the gospel and killing the Church.

In other words, many Protestant ideas and approaches have been twisted into service of the domination system of Modernity, and used to justify racism, slavery, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and war.  These have become some of the most pressing things we need to deal with in our time.

Maybe “reformation” itself is a dated concept that is now an obsolete relic of the Modern Age.  Maybe the Church today needs to understand change in a different way.  Not as reformation, but the word I use to describe what needs to happen now is “emergence.”  In other words, we are not called to reform the Church.  I am not even sure the Church itself is always “being reformed” by the Spirit, if by that we imply a kind of “get with the times” mentality placing the Church in a perpetual mode of response and reaction.  Reform too often means that the changing culture sets the agenda, as if we need a retooling or an upgrade.  A Christianity 4.0 or something.

Reform, to use the language of Ronald Heifetz, is a technical fix.  Emergence is a more comprehensive adaptive change… but does not adapt to external environmental shifts, as profound as they may be.  Rather, emergence realizes and participates in our original Source which is always present deep within us and everything.  Reform is a kind of revolution; emergence is a revelation.  Reform has to do with agendas, goals, objectives, strategies, tactics, initiatives, programs, and narratives.  Emergence lets go and lets God.  Reform manages and mixes memory and desire, past and future.  Emergence is Presence.

Five-hundred years ago, the Reformation did get at least one thing right: the Reformers understood at some level that we had to turn our attention first and only to the Word of God, Jesus Christ, who is our Source and who is God’s Wisdom and Presence.  

Maybe that’s what we have to do now as well.

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Making the World a Better Place.

One thing Jesus doesn’t do is send his disciples out “to make the world a better place.”  They are to follow him and keep his commandments.  That will make the world a better place.  But making the world a better place is secondary and derivative; it is a result and consequence of discipleship, not its motivation.

Sadly, almost everyone who sets out to make the world a better place doesn’t.  Usually they end up making the world a far worse place.

Most of the atrocities of history were committed by people trying to make the world a better place.  Nazis, for heaven’s sake, were trying to make the world a better place.  So were the Communists who managed the Gulags.  And Capitalists.  Read the writings of American slave-owners; they convinced themselves that slavery was a good thing for all concerned.  We used atomic weapons against the Japanese to make the world a better place.  Those doing the waterboarding of prisoners in Guantanamo?  It was to make the world a better place.  Israelis stealing Palestinian land?  The Chinese putting the Uighurs in concentration camps?  Petrochemical companies fracking the landscape?  All to make the world a better place.

The people who set up the Indian Schools in the 19th century thought they were making the world a better place.  Forcing Indian children to adapt to advanced, progressive white American culture was considered the most humane and liberal option at the time.  (Conservatives wanted to simply exterminate them.  To make the world a better place.)     

Human consciousness is so shot through with self-interest that we can convince ourselves that anything, literally anything from death camps to nuclear annihilation, can be rationalized as “making the world a better place” if it means a better place for us.  For we easily reason that if it were a better place for us, then surely it would be a better place for everyone.

All we need to do is get rid of those “bad people.”  That would really make the world a better place.  Then only us good people would be left, and we could live together in peace and prosperity.  Wouldn’t that be great?  Every Reign of Terror and Holocaust we have endured has been an attempt to get rid of the “bad people.”  It hasn’t worked.  Because to do that is to become bad people ourselves.

The problem with making the world a better place is that we are trying to do it before making ourselves into better people.  Bad people can’t make the world a better place.  They will try to make the world a better place for themselves, and do immeasurable harm to others — and eventually to themselves, usually — in the process.  When someone tells me they are trying to make the world a better place, it usually doesn’t take much effort to locate the ones paying the cost and bearing the consequences of that effort.  

I think we try to make the world a better place because that is easier and more immediately gratifying than what is really important, which is making ourselves into better people.  Making ourselves into better people is extremely difficult and painful.  It involves change so profound that most people who have embarked on this task say it is analogous to dying.  

That’s what Jesus says, for instance.  He says we have to give up our life, “take up a cross,” and follow him instead of our own egocentric self-interest.  

Who does that?  It is way more satisfying to force someone else to change than to change ourselves.

But until we realize that we are the ones that have to change, and that this change is a kind of death, we will continue to try to make the world a better place and in fact continue to make the world much worse until we kill the planet.

And we are running out of time because we are well on our way to doing that.  

Here’s the thing:

WE CANNOT MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE!

God already made the world and declared it very good.  It’s already very good.  Everything is.  It doesn’t need to be made better.

We do.  

Maybe if we stop trying to make the world a better place and instead focus on making ourselves better people, we will stop destroying the world and others, and allow the world’s created goodness, and ours, to emerge.

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