Dancing in the Dark

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.

He came to see Jesus at night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God."

-John 3: 1-2

Little details can tell you a lot sometimes.  Like the fact that Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night.  Why would you come at night? If you didn't want to be seen in the light of day perhaps.  This sort of fits with a theme in John's Gospel about the light and the darkness.  Jesus' dialogue with an influential Pharisee named Nicodemus contains that important and well known verses of John 3:16 and 17, about God's love for the world and how Jesus did not come to condemn the world.  They are part of his attempt to communicate the reality of his Gospel message with a man already well established as a religious man, and a fine upstanding citizen.

Jesus actually starts by deliberately confusing Nicodemus by talking about having to be born again.  Contrary to what you might assume if you only know modern Christians, this being born again thing is not a particularly huge part of historical Christianity, for good reason, it's a strange metaphor that describes the way that a person who has experienced grace feels.  They are unburdened of all their past sins and failings and feel free to enter the kingdom as a little one.  Nicodemus makes the rather common mistake of the religious sort in trying to take this metaphor too literally, and the conversation proceeds apace, eventually resolving into a rather good summation of the Good News of God's love for us and a truthful diagnosis of our own predilection towards darkness: "And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil."

It would appear that Jesus won Nicodemus over that night, because at the end of the story, when Jesus has been crucified, it is Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who take care of Jesus' body and have him put in the tomb.  It would appear that while Nicodemus did not exactly become a disciple of Jesus, he still believed that Jesus was worth something and did what he could to help.

This story makes me think about the ways in which we can bridge gaps between people, and also the way that real life is rather more ambivalent and uncertain than we would make it.  The Pharisees and the authorities are not generally treated well by the Gospels, for good reason.  They were so afraid of Jesus that they conspired to bring about his death.  Nicodemus was part of that crowd, but he also "believed" that Jesus was from God, because he saw the evidence.  He comes in secret to learn more about this person Jesus who has done some miracles.  Jesus does not fawn over him by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, he challenges Nicodemus, he criticizes his knowledge of the law, and deliberately throws up roadblocks by challenging his common sense, his theological perspective and even his righteousness, in other words he does not coddle Nicodemus in the least.  He does not worry about offending him, in fact, that barb about people loving the darkness was pretty sharply directed at the people in Nicodemus crowd.

So why doesn't this approach work any more? I mean other than because we're not Jesus? I think it's because we have forgotten how to inquire in depth about things that we think we disagree with.  We too easily seek confirmation of what we already know. Nicodemus might hope that somehow he can bring Jesus in line with orthodox ways by the time he leaves, but he leaves knowing that isn't going to happen.  Nevertheless, he is convinced still that Jesus is not a charlatan, that he really is connected to the presence of God.  That puts him in a difficult place, because he has a lot to lose if he is found to be a supporter of this man who is well on his way to being declared a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin and executed as a rebel against Rome.

Nicodemus does not allow us to see even the much maligned "pharisees and scribes" as universally evil.  We have to acknowledge that even as he participated in the system that killed Jesus, he was not entirely on the "other side" of the teaching. Nicodemus is on one hand a paradigm of the failure of moderates who may believe rightly but do not act decisively.  But he is also a man who has the humility to be corrected and challenged by Jesus, he has the ability to listen and learn and step out of the darkness just a little, even if it is a little late by most standards. This story doesn't end where people, including Nicodemus, expected it to end.

Not So Instant Karma

See, this alone I found, that God made human beings straightforward,

but they have devised many schemes.

-Ecclesiastes 7: 20

As a Christian, I do not have an explicit belief in the idea of Karma, the Hindu belief that your actions will resonate both positively and negatively into the future. Observation of reality though tells me that something very much like Karma is rather real.  As tempting as it is to dally around with eastern philosophy and talk about Dharma and Karma, that's really not my end of the pool, so let me tell you about the Teacher of Ecclesiastes, called Quoheleth in Hebrew.  You may know that I am super fond of Ecclesiastes because it is the most punk rock book in the Bible.  I always kind of wished that somehow, somewhere the Bad Brains had recorded a sped up, raged up, version of Pete Seeger's Turn, Turn, Turn, because that would have actually brought the words and the feeling of Ecclesiastes together in an almost perfect artistic moment, but I digress.

Let's just say I love Ecclesiastes because it does not sugar coat life, like at all. Kings are powerful, power and wealth usually rule the day, but in the end, none of that is going to make you happy, because it's "all vanity and chasing after the wind."  What's more, the greater your schemes get the harder your fall is probably going to be, and Quoheleth, for all his nihilism does seem to believe that there is inevitably going to be a fall, a judgment, an accounting for what has been done.

The Teacher seems to think that the best strategy is to hang back and keep it simple, don't try to fly to high, that will only attract destruction.  Mythology tells us this with tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun and Prometheus aspiring to god like power only to have his liver perpetually eaten by vultures. Quoheleth clearly advises people to keep it simple and stop trying to rule the world, it's going to end badly, as Homer (Simpson that is) told his son, "The moral of the story is never try."

If you accept the scholarly analysis that Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon at the end of his life, after his political career had blown up and he had been brought low by intrigue and old age, you might be tempted to disregard this clearly jaded wisdom, but I think Quoheleth is more than just grumpy, worn out, Solomon, I think he is the voice of perspective and honestly something very much needed no matter where or when you happen to be living. Something very like Dharma and Karma inhabit his observations: goodness and righteousness don't always seem to win, but just wait. It's like the rests between the musical notes or the negative space in painting, it's there, it's real and it is going to show up sometime.

Do you notice how people who push the boundaries of decency, especially in the public sphere do seem to get their comeuppance?  I know, it seems like it can take a long time, as it did with Harvey Weinstein and such, but do you notice how the universe just seems to pull back the wicked eventually?  You might despair as it can sometimes take a long time, but don't lose faith and patience in God or Dharma, or whatever you happen to call it.  Observe the curious case of Sean Hannity, rage muppet extraordinaire.  Sean has made a rather successful career being angry about liberal media bias, manning the watchtower of "fair and balanced" over at Fox News.  Sean has been bombastically certain that George Soros and Barack Obama were surely out to try and turn America into a Socialist state under Sharia law (as if that was possible).  He would rail in his best "Am I the only sane rational person?" tone of voice about how college professors were actively trying to do away with the first amendment to the Constitution and how Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post was somehow trying to squash his rag-tag group of freedom loving conserva-hawks (as if he didn't work for Rupert freaking Murdoch).

So now, as it turns out, Sean Baby was in some papers seized from Trump's fixer, ahem lawyer, under a duly executed warrant by New York State with Federal Court approval.  Hannity had said lawyer on his show many times and they puzzled quizzically about how upset the snowflakes were about the just and holy Donald.  Sean scrambled the defense forces and insisted that Cohen was not his lawyer, just a friend that he sometimes asked for legal advice.  This does not make Hannity come out clean, it just makes him into a moocher among other things.

None of this is really a surprise.  We all knew that Hannity was on the Trump bandwagon early and he has pretty much become lead sycophant in the administration. That's pretty much on message for Fox, but what isn't going to sit well at a network reeling from Bill O'reilley and Roger Ailes, is the perception of shadiness.  Raw partisanship is one thing, being in some sort of elite boys club that specialized in hush money and silencing women who were used by your wealthy, powerful alpha males?  Well that's probably not going to win friends and influence people.  The thing that Hannity has railed against for years, in fact built his brand upon, is the thing that he now appears quite guilty of: being in the hip pocket of an administration, that's what is particularly Karmic about this whole thing. Hannity and Fox News in general whooped and hollered about how The New York Times and The Washington Post were practically Obama's Press agents, while those outlets often issued quite critical reports about the previous administration, and certainly had no conflicts of interest on par with the Han man and the Donald sharing a freaking fixer (sorry, lawyer).

I'm more thankful than ever for the perspective of the Quoheleth, because without knowing that it's all vanity and chasing after the wind, this might just drive me crazy.

It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools.

-Ecclesiastes 7: 5

Nations Rage

Why do the nations rage, and the people's plot in vain?

-Psalm 2: 1

I did a Hebrew Exegesis paper on Psalm 2 in Seminary, which means that I took the thing apart and looked in minute detail at every word choice and alternate mode of interpretation.  I looked at the history of interpretation and the ways in which this Psalm might be read and understood, from the traditions of the Rabbis to liberation theology.  After what I'm pretty comfortable calling thorough study, I still don't know the answer to the question posed at the beginning.  I know that God is going to have the final say in the matter, but I really still can't figure out why we insist on so much greed, violence and lust for power.

Yesterday afternoon, as I was half napping in front of the TV,  a CNN segment by a reporter on the ground in a Syrian Refugee camp caught my attention.  It started with survivors of the Chemical attacks on Douma that have precipitated our latest outburst of "moral" bombing.  They had a shot of a washtub where some children's clothes were soaking to remove the residue of the chemical irritants.  A child's backpack that had an acrid chlorine smell.  Two little girls, possibly twins, about four or five years old in matching Minnie Mouse T shirts that were probably taken from a relief stockpile.  The girls were alternately seen gleeful about their Minnie Mouse gear and huddled up against the legs of their mother in her full black burkha.  The mother described from behind her veil, the experience of dragging her two little girls up out of a basement where they were hiding from bombs and gunfire, as the chlorine gas started to seep in and suffocate them.  She said something like, "death above, death below."  Then there was an old woman, stooped over and moving slowly with a cane.  She described her despair, and she was not fully veiled so you could see it in her face.  She said she can't even think about the times past, when her children and her family were all together, safe at home.  She has no home now, nothing to hope for, children that are lost, a country that is in ruins and a life that has essentially ended before she actually dies.

The little girls are a sad picture, but you can see hope in their lives.  They might, if the rest of the world comes to their senses, yet find a home where they can grow up and have something like a normal life. The old woman will probably live out her days in a tent city, where everything from blankets to the shelter is not hers but the provision of an aid agency.

I have read a lot about Syria, and nothing seems very clear to me about what the solution might be.  It seems that both intervention and non-intervention are equally bad options.  It seems that, no matter what we do, these people and others like them are going to suffer.  The complexity of the situation glares at you from every dark corner: little children who try to protect their dolls from chemical weapons, and yet can play in the relative safety of a refugee camp, but they live with such minimal comfort.  A mother who bravely tries to put together life for her family, but who is forced by her religion to wear a full lengthy, heavy black robe, and is perhaps even convinced that she wants to do so. A man who won't even admit how badly he has been damaged by chemicals.  An old woman who has nothing left but to simply try and forget the life she will never see again.

These are tragedies that can be easily forgotten as the talking heads muse about geopolitical realities and conflicts between nation-tribes.  I am thankful for the one thing that television news really does fairly well, it lets us see the faces and the despair in the eyes, it lets us see these little ones and these others who we would too easily dehumanize in order to feel right about laying waste to their homes. I cannot do much of anything to help those people, maybe give a little here and there to help those groups that put up those tent cities, but what I would really like to know about is a way that we can give that old woman back her home and her life.

It's a terrible reality to see, when you know that if we don't go to war, a monster might continue to commit genocide, but if if we do go to war we might just become part of the monster that destroys and decimates the same people we are trying to "help."  Yesterday, I preached about Peter and John in Acts 3, they encounter a man who is lame from birth and they have no alms to give him, they can do nothing charitable for him, but they can give him the name of Jesus, and that name can make him walk.  They have to look him in the eye and he has to look at them, they have to show him what Jesus looks like.  The seeing is important, the encounter with the suffering is important, they have learned that much from their Lord.  Healing happens when they give what they have, even  if it is not what was expected.

I don't know exactly what we can give the people of Syria right now, but I know one thing for sure, we have to really start seeing them.  We have to see the little girls in their Minnie Mouse T shirts and the old woman who will hobble her way through what is left of her life in a camp, never again to have her kitchen filled with the laughter of grandchildren.  We have to see that this is a tragedy that cannot be solved with "beautiful, smart" missiles or arrogant posturing.  The nations raging and the peoples plotting is what has gotten us to this point.  It doesn't really matter why, but if we see it with the loving eyes of God, we must know it has to stop at some point.

Wisdom Sighs

Do not invite death by the error of your life,

Or bring on the destruction by the work of your hands;

Because God did not make death,

and he does not delight in the death of the living.

-Wisdom of Solomon 1: 12-13

For you that might be curious about the Bible and the things that almost make it to the pages of Scripture, I give you the Apocryphal book of the Wisdom of Solomon.  As opposed to say the Book of Enoch (the one the lady at the car dealership was all googly about), which is non-canonical Apocrypha.  The formation of the Canon of Scripture, including the canonical Apocrypha of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions is not the result of some sort of shady inter-ecclesial intrigue as writers of fiction like Dan Brown might lead you to believe, but rather a process of determining whether the overall theology and impact of the writings is consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament. To be included in the canon, even the Apocrypha, it needs to meet certain standards, and be considered more constructive and salubrious than not.

The Canonical Apocrypha contains two books of Wisdom literature, comparable to Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes in their content: The Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Jesus Ben (son of) Sirach (also just called Sirach).  The reason why I think these books are valuable is because they provide us with the actual philosophy of the Scripture, rather than just a story.  The Bible is not exactly short on wisdom in a general sense, but the form of literature that we directly classify as Wisdom is a little thin compared with other types of writing.  Proverbs is the big boy, also generally attributed to Solomon, and in chapter 8, Wisdom is described as a woman standing at the crossroads and at the gates of the city: "To you, O people, I call and my cry is to all that live, O simple ones, learn prudence, acquire intelligence, you who lack it." (Proverbs 8: 4-5)

There are things in the world that baffle our ability to understand, and in these places Wisdom is a place to turn for some sort of guidance.  Our ongoing effort to destroy our environment and the way we tacitly allow injustice and poverty to destroy the dignity of our fellow humans, have created a global scenario where war is practically inevitable.  As long as we see our place in creation as consumers and users instead of stewards we will necessarily get to the place where we have to fight and destroy in order to dominate the earth and each other.  This clearly violates God's plan and the voice of Wisdom, but we do not seem to give that much thought.

Last week the Donald said that it was about time for the US to clear on out of Syria and leave that mess to others to sort out.  At first glance, it was one of those things that gave me pause in my ongoing disappointment with our Chief Executive.  It was one of those hopeful moments that I thought, "he might actually do the right thing, even if it is for the wrong reasons," which is pretty much all I have to hang my hope on for the next two to six years. I believe that actually it should not be our job to be the policeman of the world, it should not always be our soldiers in harm's way.  I'm no isolationist, I believe we should be a good global citizen and do our part to protect human rights and such, but we have long passed the horizon of diminishing returns when it comes to Imperialist interventions. No one appreciates our army in their sandbox, least of all any of the Middle Eastern nations we have made a hobby of invading, bombing and generally smacking around for the past 30 years. It's not getting better, and our meddling is probably (definitely?) making it worse.

Alas, I can believe that and say that with minimal consequences, El Presidente cannot. Almost as if on cue, there was a chemical weapon attack in Syria that gave us pictures of dead children to remind us that we really are brutish apes with savage weapons. If you don't see the connection between the two things you are rather willfully obtuse.  Someone, maybe multiple someones, does not want us to get our boots off the ground.  It could be, as the Russians (in good old Cold War style) say, the attack was staged by rebels who are against their puppet monster Assad, because they don't want the US to leave the area.  It could be that Assad, Russia and Iran actually want us to stay because our involvement keeps blood on our hands, keeps us occupied and spending precious dollars, and makes lots and lots of people in that part of the world hate us. I can only guess at who or what is actually behind that, but one thing is pretty clear, they don't want us to take our ball and go home and they are willing to gas kids and families to give us a good and "just" reason to stay. They would probably all like to see the impetuous bully and the country that elected him king get kicked in the family jewels. The Middle East is a complicated place, and it pretty much always has been, which is why people from their really needed to write down anything that could pass as wisdom.  It also probably explained why the Teacher of Ecclesiastes says, "It's all vanity and chasing after the wind."  You honestly can't win, so what he says is just do your best and try not to be a huge jerk.  Wisdom:

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded

than the shouting of a ruler among fools.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war,

but one bungler destroys much good.

-Ecclesiastes 9: 17-18

Just ouch.

Sojourners

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and powerful than we.

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of a war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land."

Exodus 1: 8-10

I guess growing up in an area where migrant workers were a pretty normal part of life, I had early exposure to immigrants.  My experience of the Mexican men who worked in the mushroom houses and farms of my little corner of the world was that they were people who worked hard and mostly tried to stay as invisible as they could.  Mostly what you heard about were incidents where there would be a car crash and wounded people would actually hide from EMS and police because they were not in the country legally.  Crime among their population was mostly between themselves, and usually involved the pretty mundane, alcohol related stuff that any 20 something man/boy away from home for the first time might get into.  Breaking laws that would draw the attention of the gringos was just too dangerous for these young men who didn't speak the language and who were far away from home.  Personally I always felt a certain sympathy for them, they never seemed dangerous and mostly just seemed afraid of getting noticed.

My first real job was working as a clerk at the Acme (supermarket), and there I got my first glimpse of what living among the migrant population is like.  They would pool their resources into a rather sizable wad of twenty dollar bills and go the store in a group.  They would buy the cheapest things they could, chipped steak, beans, tripe, rice, canned stuff, flour, really basic stuff, by the cart load.They didn't always know how much things cost, or how to ask questions about their bill in English.  They would just hand you the whole wad of cash that they had, and it was usually quite a bit more than was required. I often had to count out the money for them and assure them that the twenties I was handing them were not necessary to pay for their tab.  I know for a fact that not everyone who dealt with them in life was as honest as I was.

I know they were vulnerable and often advantage was taken.  I also know that many of my peers would make fun of them.  I also know that at least a few people I know really hated them, I don't exactly know why. I still don't quite understand how a nation of immigrants can be so hostile to immigrants and migrants, but it's an old problem.  This is in the Washington Post this morning. And I think I actually agree that the fear of immigrants might very well be a major impulse driving the move towards authoritarian populism around the world.  I read and watched Frank Bruni at the NY Times interview Ann Coulter, who is super agitated with her former BFF about his inability to build the wall on the southern border. It occurs to me that, somehow or other, people have come to see immigrants as a major threat to our well being.  Last year in the much publicized Virginia Gubernatorial race, Ed Gillespie ran ads about the Latin American super-gang MS-13 that made it sound like anyone who supports the rights of immigrants was dooming Northern Virginia to become the next Bogota.  This fear does not really jive well with reality, so he lost.  But the fear can still play a powerful role in shaping our behavior in concrete and abstract ways.

Liberal religious types (mea culpa) will often cite the numerous passages in the Hebrew Scriptures where God directly instructs his chosen people to deal justly with aliens and sojourners in their midst.  I'm guessing the reason this gets repeated prominently and often, is because that is not something that comes naturally to anyone.  Even a people who had been oppressed, as say the various waves of European immigrants to America have been, tend to conveniently forget how that feels when the new kid moves onto the block.  The Galston piece linked above warns us not to simply ignore this tendency.  Blaming people who look different from you for all your problems is a quick off ramp for most of us, whether we admit it or not.  We need to admit it more readily.  There were many times that I would participate in telling stories and talking about the big vans of Mexicans that came to the store.  Even if I treated them justly, I could still alienate them in my mind and heart.  Encouraging people to really embrace the sojourner is no easy task.

It's easier to believe that building the wall or slapping on tariffs is going to help us get back to "winning," whatever that means. It would be so much simpler to do those things, even if they make little sense and hold little actual hope of improving things.  Dealing with the slow and complicated process of creating a just society that offers security as well as opportunity for all?  Well that idea is having a little trouble getting traction these days.  As Trump has found over the past six months it's a lot easier to break DACA than it is to find a better solution. And that is sort of where we are with regard to this, and various other crises, we see, like Pharaoh did, something that very well could be something to fear, and we react poorly. In hindsight Pharaoh's fears seem irrational, and his mistreatment of the Israelites, far from saving the day, actually spells his doom, maybe we should pay attention to that story.

Here's a thing I keep in mind, when I was 16 years old, I had a union job at that Acme Market, I had benefits and security that those Mexican workers did not have.  I could get that job because I had transportation, citizenship, proper clothing and a place to call home. They had none of that, and had to do the dark and dirty jobs that very few of my fellow Chester County folk had any intention of doing. I feel kind of good that I just didn't flat rob them at the checkout counter, but that is literally the least I could do.  We should do better by the sojourners in our midst, not worse.  The large majority of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, come here to find a better life than they had.

Fear will drive us to do horrible things, justice and mercy will lead us in the right direction.  Fear seems like the obvious and easy path, justice and mercy seem more dangerous and difficult, but one way leads to destruction and the other to life, I guess we need to make a decision soon.  Hope we make the right one, because I'm not okay with plagues.