Flooding the Zone.

How do we assess, let alone follow, the Truth, when the strategy of some is to, in their own words, "flood with zone with shit"?  They spout a torrent of false, extreme, contradictory, even absurd and impossible information to confuse and demoralize most people so that they either throw their hands up in frustration, not knowing what to believe, or latch on to the collection of lies that most easily appeals most to their grievance, anger, hatred, ignorance, and paranoia.

This kind of thing even appears on friends' Facebook feeds.  I mean, I see lengthy screeds of incoherent babble, replete with capital letters so we know how serious and upset they are, but almost all of which is, at best, a wildly negative spin on narrowly selected actual facts, or, at worst, just made up nonsense, all willfully impervious to any kind of evidence to the contrary no matter how overwhelming.  (I have defriended people who try this on my own feed.)  In order to justify the level of hysteria they want to maintain, they have to pretend we live in a hellscape of crime, corruption, and invasion, so they can blame their political adversaries for creating it.

The latest event is the search carried out by law enforcement of the home of the former President.  Apparently, one common prevalent text message reaction shared among his supporters was "lock and load!" a reference to firearms.  This is very dangerous because there are people out there who will commit violence.  Indeed, they have already done so!  I am concerned that we are just waiting for the next Timothy McVeigh or Dylan Roof, someone twisted into believing that their cowardly act of mass murder will spark the "race war," or "civil war" that many pundits and influencers are openly calling for.  They already say that the January 6 sacking of the Capitol building by an artificially incensed mob was some kind of dress rehearsal for future actions. 

The Lord Jesus lived under the systematic oppression of the Roman Empire.  The media environment was dominated by Roman propaganda with an overlay of legalistic religious nationalism by the leaders of his own people.  How does he cut through a social world similarly deliberately flooded with malicious disinformation?  How does he locate and articulate what is true amid a system far more swamped and corrupted by lies than ours?       

Jesus recognizes that we find Truth by interacting with the bodies of suffering people.  He comes to serve the victims of all this fabricated mental, verbal turbulence.  We find him directly addressing people and a planet in pain, doing small, individual things to bring God's love into the real lives of those who bear the brunt of this shitstorm.  He heals, he liberates people from demonic bondage, he feeds the hungry, he welcomes the excluded, and lifts up the marginalized.  He literally walks, eats, travels, talks with, and touches people.  He listens to them, and responds to them.  He even says that serving them is serving him.

The Lord does not concern himself with mental constructs.  Neither does he posture or project a particular inviting image.  He has no wealth, wields no power, and places no trust in popularity or fame.  Indeed, he consistently rejects all of these personal benefits.  His whole life is an expression of God's self-emptying love.  

Demonic forces will always flood the zone with lies and nonsense as a way to produce profit from the confusion, anger, fear, and violence that gets generated.  For them it is all about what they can gain for themselves.  

The Lord Jesus is about solidarity with the suffering, empathy with the confused, service to the needy, and healing the broken.  He also has some choice, harsh words for those who, rather than alleviate the pain of others, cynically use it for personal gain.

In all this, he reveals himself as the Truth, which is the generous outpouring of love and goodness from God to those in need.  And that's the Way we know and participate in the Truth: by sharing in his ministry of sacrifice and service, reversal and redemption, justice and blessing, and flooding our world with love.     

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"Works Righteousness."

When I was in seminary, I remember a conversation about something a rabbi was quoted as saying: "If you want to be a good Jew, then act like one!"  One of my friends was quick to dismiss this as "works righteousness," a big no-no for Protestants.  I sort of had to agree, but I remember not being comfortable about it.

The "heresy" of "works righteousness" is based supposedly on Martin Luther's original critique of Medieval Roman Catholicism's habit of dispensing God's grace as a reward for giving money to the church or fulfilling pious rituals.  Protestants came to understand that we are saved by God's grace alone, and not by anything we do.  At the same time, we also know that "faith without works is dead," which means that real faith is not fruitless, it necessarily results in good actions.  There is therefore no such thing as either faith that is not expressed in good actions (or, I would add, good action that is not rooted in faith).

I had read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's critique of what he called "cheap grace," which was grace doled out by the church without getting reflected in good works.  Bonhoeffer said that only someone who is obedient to Jesus really believes in him, and only one who obeys him actually believes in him.  The idea that faith does not require or inspire us to do anything is not what the New Testament teaches.  Jesus is always talking about what we need to do, as are Paul and other writers of the New Testament.  No, we are not saved because we do these good things, that would indeed be works righteousness.  But we do good things because we are saved.  In no case are good works disconnected from God's grace.

But this is what some Protestants actually do.  The worst ramification of the allergy to "works righteousness" is the view that what we do doesn't matter at all.  That we are saved is enough, and now we may go about our business as we see fit.  This attitude is what led to the despicable spectacle of baptized Christians driving trains to Auschwitz while imagining they were still saved.  This is where we have Army chaplains in WWII reassuring American bomber crews that the firebombing of Japanese cities, slaughtering thousands of civilians, would not affect their standing with God.  It is a convenient way to make faith utterly irrelevant to your life, and give yourself license to commit all kinds of atrocities with impunity.  

Indeed, here we see the whole point to such a pernicious doctrine: the State can demand all kinds of bad behavior from a person, and still reassure them that they will get into heaven.  After all, connecting good actions to faith would be the heresy of works righteousness.

Personally, I would much rather serve a church full of people trying to live the gospel and follow Jesus in their good deeds, and take the risk of being charged with works righteousness, than serve in one where most members blithely drift in a complacent reverie about how saved they are because of their faith, while flagrantly living lives of depravity, injustice, cruelty, fear, and violence.  

For in the end that rabbi was right.  Doing good works itself reveals a trust in God (faith) that the person may not yet be able to articulate.  Paul himself says that people can keep the law and not realize it is God's law they are keeping.  This is what Bonhoeffer means when he says that someone who obeys Jesus in their actions thereby reveals their own faith.

Finally, in real life we learn by doing.  We do not try to gin up some mental state or cognitive opinions called "faith," and only then obey Jesus' teachings.  That is a form of procrastination designed to let you off the hook of discipleship.  No, we do what he commands us, and in so doing we discover the faith we have always had within us, which is the faith of Jesus Christ.

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The Long Arc of Justice.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968 (four days before he was murdered)

The moral universe, which is to say, the creation as made and intended by the Creator, which is to say the Truth, has a direction.  That direction is justice.  Not the corrupt, retributive, coercive legalism society defines as justice, but the true justice of the Creator, which is about inclusion, equality, compassion, and freedom.  That is: Restorative justice, the justice in which the high and mighty are brought low and the marginalized and poor are lifted up. 

Dr. King here articulates the Bible's view of history, epitomized by the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  All the prophets say much the same thing: as bad as it may get in the meantime, the ultimate victory belongs to God.  All the prophets temper their dire predictions of disaster with glorious (if often brief) sections about hope and redemption.  The Truth always wins in the end.  Always.

God places the Church here as a living witness to, and anticipation of, this Truth.  We point to it.  We look for it.  We organize ourselves to embody it in advance.  We call others by our example.  Martyrs died rather than succumb to the lies in which the world is immersed and by which it is enslaved.  To live in hope is to live in the light of the justice towards which the arc of the moral universe inexorably bends.

And the shape of this justice is clear, first in the life and teaching of the Lord Jesus.  Indeed, beginning with his mother's hymn in Luke 1, and continuing with characteristic passages where he sets out his mission, like the passages in Luke 4, Matthew 11 and Matthew 25, where justice emerges in social reversal: the sick are made well, the blind see, the lame walk, the slaves are freed, the hungry fed, the rich sent away empty, and the dead are raised.  Add these to additional New Testament witnesses like the Apostle Paul in Romans 12, and the writings of the apostles James and John, we see what justice means for Jesus and his followers.  It means love, as demonstrated by the humility, compassion, gentleness, service, and generosity we see in the Lord's Sermon on the Mount. 

God's justice is revealed in the barrier-shattering oneness we see in Galatians 3:28, which is accomplished in the self-emptying love of Philippians 2.

Meanwhile, the arc is indeed long.  J. R. R. Tolkien spoke of history as a "long defeat."  And yet with every loss and setback, we hold even firmer to the hope of final victory... because in Jesus Christ we have seen in, and may participate in it together in advance.  Because the disintegration and collapse of this world of sin and falsehood, characterized by selfishness, blindness, and violence -- and rampant injustice and oppression -- is inevitable.  

Last month, at the Wild Goose Festival, the opening night's preacher was Rev. William Barber.  He told a story about our history.  In 1857, after the Supreme Court's catastrophic Dred Scott decision, denying the legality of citizenship for African Americans and upholding slavery, the defeated abolitionist leaders assembled.  Across this depressed and despondent gathering, Sojourner Truth stood up and loudly called out to Frederick Douglass, "Frederick, is God dead?"  In other words, Does the triumph of evil mean that God has been finally defeated, even killed?  Does it mean that God isn't real and hope is futile?  Does it mean we should all give up and go home, submitting to the obscenity, atrocity, and inhuman violence of human "justice"?  

Of course not.  God does not leave the Israelites in Egypt, nor the Jews in Babylon.  Neither does Jesus Christ stay dead when the Romans execute him.  God always wins.  That's what Dr. King is saying.  It may take a while.  Ego and Empire remain strong.  But they always lose.  

Last week, we heard the teaching of Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal on "Exilic Hope for a Land in Crisis."  She reflected on a faithful response to the Climate Crisis, especially from the perspective of the people with whom she has ministered in Fiji, whose lands are being swallowed up by the rising sea level.  In the end, she said, we do good and follow Jesus' example of simplicity, not because it delivers instant results, but just because it is the right way to live according to the will of the Creator.

In these days, when democracy, freedom, the fate of the planet, and even truth itself are under grave threat, we have to realize that nothing is more important or consequential than following Jesus.  Not talking about Jesus, or thinking about Jesus, or carrying flags and signs about Jesus, but actually following him.  Actually living together according to his compassion, humility, inclusion, forgiveness, non-violence, liberation, and joy.      

That is all that matters.  That is all that has ever mattered.

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