Shoah

I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.

-Elie Wiesel, Night

Today is the day that we remember the millions of people who died at the hands of the Nazis.  One day, somewhat ironically placed at the end of May when new life is springing up all around and flowers are in bloom on the trees.  We sometimes call it the holocaust, from the Greek word that means "burnt," which I suppose is somewhat appropriate, but many have re-labeled it using the Hebrew word Shoah, which means "catastrophe."

It's worth mentioning that Jews were not the only victims of the catastrophe, but they were focal point of the hate behind Hitler and the Nazis.  I think it's also worth mentioning that this sort of thing has happened far too often in the recent history of the world.  Stalin, our ally in defeating Hitler, apparently outdid Adolf in both scope and brutality, there have been numerous genocidal events in Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and Congo, and there is one going on in Syria as we speak.
These are all catastrophes of human evil.
They at least raise the question of whether or not God really knows what He's doing in giving us this sort of freedom.  If you have not read Elie Wiesel's book Night, you really should get around to it, but have a good stiff drink handy.  Wiesel survived the Shoah as a boy, he watched his parents taken away and killed, he starved in the camps, he lived in the fear that, at any moment, he might arbitrarily be taken away and shot or gassed and burned in the ovens.
There really is no good theological way to talk around the questions that Wiesel raises in his book, they are things you must just simply absorb and endure.  He talks of how the Shoah killed God.  God hung on the gallows, God went into the ovens, God died in the night.
He's not wrong.
It's a powerful read for Christians, but in an entirely different sense than it is for our Jewish friends.
Christians live through the story of God dying every year.  The cross is nothing new to our way of thinking, the brutal act of crucifixion is a part of our faith story, and so is resurrection.
The thing is though, there has been no Easter morning for Jews after the Shoah.  There are small redemptive moments, there are powerful remembrances, but there is nothing that opens the tombs of the millions who died.
Which makes it all the more wondrous to me that people like Wiesel and other Shoah survivors have managed to do just that: survive.  They have survived physically, spiritually and they have blessed the world with their stories, and they have held on to God, and found that He was not dead after all.
As time does naturally what Hitler tried to do brutally, we need to observe and remember all the more vigilantly, and we need to remember that we, as a species, have not risen above the hate and violence that caused the catastrophe.  When the eyewitnesses are no longer around to tell us what happened, we still need to remember.

Mother Earth

Tuesday was Earth Day, a "holiday" of sorts where we think about all things ecological.  In another lifetime, I studied Environmental Resource Management at the Pennsylvania State University, and even though life and God's call have taken me far away from that field of study, I'm still paying attention.  In the nearly 20 years since I graduated some things have radically changed, other things have not.  We have "greened" up in a lot of ways, solar farms and wind turbines are now common sites around the nation, and growing numbers of people are moving from the "environmentalism is all about hippie communists" camp to the, "hmmm, clean drinking water and breathable air are pretty cool things" camp. But we're still a long way from breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, and so the noose around our neck grows ever tighter.
Ecology is a complicated thing, and like many complicated things, it frightens and intimidates people, inducing a range of reactions from flat out denial to apocalyptic panic.  As per usual, extreme reactions are usually a result of drastically over-simplifying the problem.  The deniers confuse current local weather patterns with long term climate data, the chicken littles believe that Waterworld is right around the corner.  As per usual, extreme perspectives are usually wrong, with only a grain of truth to make them seem plausible.
We do certainly need to get a handle on our stewardship of this planet, because science is telling us that in the vastness of the universe, planets similar to our own are a little hard to come by.  They may be out there, but as of now we have not found them, let alone developed the ability to get to them.  It's rather startling really, how tenuous our hold on life actually is.  Life is resilient, but things do go extinct, and we would do well to remember that.
Mind boggling creatures have walked, swum and flown around this planet over the course of geologic history, and many of them are now nothing but fossils.  We may be someday too, before the sun burns out.  But here's the funny thing, we are also the first species, (at least as far as we know) to be aware of its capacity to cause its own destruction.  Which gives us a fighting chance, maybe not much of one given human nature, but at least a chance.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about humanity is that, collectively, we have not come to the realization that we can really change things for the better.  We are still unfortunate slaves to the way things always have been.  Individually we can be altruistic and understand the need for sacrifice, but collectively, we are still blind, selfish and prone to panic.  This is born out by the reality that there is still poverty and famine in the world, and by the fact that we still don't recognize, despite an increasing global awareness, that we're all in this together.
I'm not exactly an optimist, and I am fully aware of the nature of sin, but it still gives me major agitation to think that children starve while we let millions of tons of grain rot in storage.  It torques me to think that some people are paid millions of dollars a year to play games or play games with numbers, while people who work in desperate and inhumane conditions get next to nothing.  What bothers me most of all is that I am absolutely powerless to change any of it.  I might as well tell the wind not to blow for all the good my rage will do.
So I do little things, like pay a little more for the coffee I drink in the morning, so that more coffee farmers in Rwanda can make a bit a of better living.  I recycle, I compost, I support various charities that work for environmental and social justice, but I'm just shouting at the ocean.
I hope, for my children's sake, that something in our collective human consciousness gets over its adolescent self-absorption soon.  We need the earth a lot more than she needs us, and so as is the case with Easter, we need to remember that every day is Earth Day, every day we need to breath air and drink water is a day that we should remember to be good and faithful stewards of our place on this "salubrious blue-green orb," as Kurt Vonnegut so loquaciously called it.
I look around my backyard, in the middle of the Megalopolis, just 20 miles from Washington DC, I see life going on, trees growing tall, animals thriving in the spaces between human habitations.  I realize that even now, as "civilized" as we are, we are still capable of living in balance with nature, but we do need to understand that balance is not served by simply taking whatever and as much as we think we need.
We need to take responsibility for what we have done, and make a better plan for what we're going to do, or else the Earth will celebrate her day without us.

Out, Out, Brief Candle!

Today is St. Georges day, the day that we commonly observe both the birth and death of William Shakespeare.  To many, Shakespeare is the epitome of literary culture, particularly when it comes to his plays.  History is an interesting thing, it twists and turns in such unexpected ways.
When Shakespeare first appeared on the stage, he was hailed, more or less as a hack, who was making cheap knockoffs of work of the true geniuses of the day (notably Christopher Marlowe).  Indeed when one looks at Shakespeare's work on it's own merit, it is generally not terribly inventive.  He writes histories, tragedies and comedies and he's not above a little pandering to the audience with bawdy humor.
I thought about this as I was watching an advertisement for yet another re-make of Godzilla that's due out soon, and yet another edition of the Amazing Spiderman series. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good superhero movie, and endless remakes of old horror flicks, and I'm married to someone who can watch chick flicks with the most absurd premises and deliberately manipulative plot lines that you can possibly imagine, and it doesn't mean we're stupid.  What it means is that we like to be entertained.  I have watched some movies that break new ground; that tell really novel stories; that challenge me to think about the human condition; and when they were done, I thought, "wow, I'm glad that's over."
I would like to tell you that I watch nothing but inventive independent films that push the boundaries of cinema as an art form, but honestly, the last thing I rented was Thor, The Dark World, partly because I have a ten year old son, but partly because I just like watching stuff explode.
What Bill Shakespeare did, perhaps better than any writer ever, was slip some really wonderful words into his pandering, money-making machines.  I suspect he knew that there is actually very little artistic integrity in starving to death, and I think he would be somewhat amused or perhaps bemused by the fact that his plays are now considered by most high school English teachers to be the zenith of English literature.  What he did was present his genius in digestible chunks.
His blasts of witty dialogue are the foundation for the great masters of the golden age of cinema, think of the banter between Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, that was none other than William Faulkner.  I can picture Ingrid Bergman delivering Rosalind's line from As You Like It: "I pray you, do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine."
The histories and tragedies have those famous monologues that are the forerunners the rousing speeches in the war movies.  If you ever see Kenneth Branagh's cinematic renderings of Shakespeare's work, you will understand that plays were simply the movies of the Elizabethan era, and as such they had to satisfy a certain commercial appeal, which means catering to the masses.
And if you think that the masses were more literate, or more intelligent and discerning than they are today, you are sorely mistaken.  Shakespeare includes enough fart jokes, insults and sexual innuendo to keep the pub crowd happy, and then he slips in these monologues that really deal with our common humanity.  I guess that's what sets him apart.  Maybe that's why we read his stuff, instead of Marlowe, in high school English classes.
There is no shame in making art that people, even the low-brow, and unwashed, actually enjoy.  That's why Nicholas Sparks and Stephen King are freaking billionaires, they make stuff that is marginally valuable as literature, but people eat it up.  People that insist on a stringent artistic vision regardless of what people want, usually die broke.  There's no doubt in my mind that William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson are better writers than George R.R. Martin, but Game of Thrones is making that dude super rich and Thompson needed Johnny Depp to finance his funeral (granted that was a work of art too).
Ultimately Shakespeare's legacy is not reducible to just the things he wrote, he has become a cultural foundation stone.  And I suppose we ought to get used to the fact that our culture has been profoundly shaped by a man who was not above going for some cheap laughs with a page long fat joke (Comedy of Errors) or numerous thinly veiled innuendos that would definitely earn an R-rating.
Like it or not, mass appeal is something you probably need to consider when setting out on an artistic adventure.  It doesn't mean you have to dumb down, or always take the low road, but it does mean you should probably know your audience.  Shakespeare did, and he is now the Immortal Bard.

Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning

There's an on-going "dispute" among the members of the GSPC praise band about the relative merits of a certain song called Every Morning Is Easter Morning.  Apparently, at some point in the history of this group, this song was sung a little bit too much, and it's one of those songs that can get overexposed quick, fast and in a hurry.  Some people love it, some people sort of cringe when you mention the title, my predecessor banned it, due to overexposure.
It's an understandable restriction.  Despite the theological truth of the song, it is not exactly Amazing Grace.
Easter this year was quite an event, in our house, not only did we have the normal demands of my role in the Church's celebration, we had family visiting from as far away as Wisconsin.  We had seven adults and six children hanging out at our house, and it was a pretty good time, but it didn't exactly leave me a lot of time for solemn reflection on the silence of the tomb.
But we survived, and Jesus is risen, and it's Tuesday morning.  In the modern rhythms of life Tuesday morning can be a sort of symbol of the ordinary.  It's not loathed like Monday or celebrated like Friday, it's not hump day or thirsty Thursday, if you still listen to the radio it might be double-shot Tuesday, but who really cares?
Tuesday is nothing special, but it's still a day for living the resurrection, in fact it may be the best day for living the resurrection.  Why? Well because the resurrection means more than just a special occurrence.  Like the song says, "every morning is Easter morning."  We live in the reality of the resurrection and that should change things rather radically.  Resurrection means death does not get the last word, and that should certainly change the way we live.
There is far too much "human nature" that is founded on the fear of mortality.  We grasp power and engage in futile hedonism because life is too short.  We neglect God and others because we just don't have time.  But what if we shift our thinking towards the infinite?  What if, it's not just "out brief candle?"
What if there's more?
And not just a vague disembodied more, but a more that shares deeply and significantly with the now.  What if your scars and your brokenness and all your Tuesday mornings go with you?
What if all the songs you sing and the relationships you build matter?  What if profound melodies, boppy, borderline annoying tunes and obscure Cowboy Junkies songs all somehow get woven into a chorus of holy music?
What if it all matters?
Not just Sunday.

We're on Each Other's Team

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, 

but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

-Matthew 7:21

Today is Maundy Thursday, which I thought growing up was Monday Thursday, and that seemed strange.  Maundy is derived from the Latin word mandatum, which means "mandate."  Jesus has called his disciples, taught them what they needed to know, and now, before the suffering and death, before the resurrection, he gives them their purpose.

In most of the modern protestant formulations of Christianity we have emphasized the idea of salvation by grace through faith.  This was a reaction to the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the practice of  "works righteousness" where you could work your way out of your sins with acts of penance (the most particularly repugnant to reformers was giving a whole bunch of money to the church in exchange for forgiveness of sins). 

Theological ideas, like most human constructions, tend to swing like a pendulum, an initial impetus pushes an idea in one direction and it moves, then most often it gets to a place where the inertia of the initial impulse simply runs out and the pendulum begins to swing back the other way.  The reaction against works righteousness and the simultaneous rise of individualism have created a bit of a monster: a brand of Christianity that stridently preaches the Gospel of "giving your heart to Jesus," but only sporadically challenges people to live into the transformative power of that affirmation.  And so you have millions of people who strongly self-identify as Christian, but who have only a thumbnail sketch in their mind of what Jesus actually said and did.

I used to hate group projects.  I used to hate getting randomly assigned to work with a bunch of other people on something or other and finding out that half the "team" thought meetings were more or less optional.  It has taken me years and is an on going discipline in my life to learn to work with and accept the way other people work.  In pastoral work, it's tempting to wish for a congregation full of dedicated disciples, all of whom hold solid theology and all of whom are striving for the kingdom in the best sense of the word.  Then I have to be convicted of the naivety of that desire, and I have to learn, over and over how to work with what I've got.

Remember a couple of years ago when Lebron James left Cleveland for Miami?  People in Cleveland burned his jersey and generally wanted to strangle him, but people everywhere else pretty much understood why he was leaving, even if they didn't particularly care for the, "I'm taking my talents to South Beach," TV extravaganza.  He looked around a the Cleveland Cavaliers and he saw a team that, without him, was going absolutely nowhere, and even with him was only ever going to get close but no cigar.  He understood that even as preternaturally talented as he is, basketball is a team game, and to win the big prize you have to have teammates.  He didn't like the teammates he had there and he liked the teammates in Miami a lot better.  Lucky for us, Jesus was a different sort of King.

When I read articles and blogs, or hear first hand stories about why people have left or are leaving the church, I can feel in my guts that the criticism of the Body of Christ is all fairly well deserved.  Churches and their people can be annoying, misguided and sometimes downright toxic.  We are full of sloppy theology, intolerant and dogmatic positions, loose organizational controls and sometimes just downright laziness.

Then I remember that Judas and Peter were both part of the Mandate.  The betrayer and the denier were both there when Jesus broke the bread and made the New Covenant.  Peter was going to make amends, but Judas?  Yes, Judas.  This gets really messy.

Judas had some messy work to do, but I suspect he's not the villain that Dante made him out to be.  I suspect that Judas is just like many people in Christian churches all over the world, who think that they are advancing the cause, and maybe he is, but I suspect not in the way he imagined.  The explanation that I like best about why Judas betrays Jesus is not the greed angle, it's the zealot angle.  I think that Judas was trying to force Jesus' hand and get the rebellion started, I think he really thought that once the palace guards were there to arrest Jesus, the gloves would come off and the Messianic butt-whooping would commence.

Slight miscalculation on his part, but we all make them.

It's not enough to call Jesus Lord and then ignore everything he taught, or even selectively ignore things that you don't happen to like. It is not enough to go all lone ranger on the high plains of  "spirituality." That is not salvation.  That is only the individualist simulacrum of salvation which is the great heresy of modern Christianity. Salvation is not just what happens when you die, it is living out the process of both justification (getting saved) and sanctification (which does not have a neat little word or phrase to describe it because it is too complicated).  If it was as simple as a confession or affirming the proper doctrine, Jesus would not have said anything like the above quote from Matthew's Gospel, but he did and he repeated similar themes in parables and teachings all the time.

We're all lucky that there's such a thing as grace, because without it we would be in big trouble.  Look around you on Sunday, look at all those people you know, and a whole bunch that you don't know: they're your team.  It ain't always gonna be pretty, but it is the Mandate.

Chinatown

I guess what you eventually have to come to terms with is the fact that Jesus believed in God, a very specific God as a matter of fact, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God he called Father.  Scripture offers very little evidence that Jesus thought he was that God.  In fact, the synoptic Gospels don't ever seem to deal with that question.  But John starts his Gospel with the bold statement that, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," and "the Word was with God and the Word was God."
This is where things get difficult and confusing, this is where the theologians start to get a reputation for endless and intractable arguing that seems to do nothing and go nowhere, this is the Chinatown of faith.
In the movie Chinatown, Jack Nicholson plays a private detective who used to work for the LAPD.  When he was with the police, one of his beats was the Asian immigrant section of the city.  In that era, as I suppose it still is to some extent, the immigrant community was insular and downright mystifying to westerners.  Crimes took on such a different character that the detectives that worked the Chinatown beat had a way of brushing off things that just didn't make sense or that challenged their assumptions a little too much: "It's Chinatown."  That's all you needed to say when things got a little too convoluted, it was an explanation without actually explaining.
The "Chinatown" of Christian faith is this thing called the Trinity, or the Triune nature of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (or if you prefer: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer).  Internally we have the Nicene Creed and some really wonderful explanations of how and why we believe, including the poetic explanation of John Donne: "Bones to reason but milk to faith."  Trinitarian faith allows us to be internally consistent, and affirm quite a few things about the nature of the relationship between God the Creator and Jesus of Nazareth.  These affirmations are crucial to Christian understanding of our own relationship with God.
When we read, study and say the Nicene Creed, we are getting in touch with an historical debate of enormous scope and importance, but it's a debate that to critics on the outside often looks like a bunch of political squabbles between bishops about who is going to run the show.  There are all sorts of conspiracy theories and various forms of religio-historic quackery that surround the fourth century debates that defined and continue to define Christian orthodoxy.
The Trinity, and springing from that the equally head spinning debate over the human/divine nature of Jesus.  Another scene from Chinatown, (spoiler alert, although is that really necessary for a movie that has been around so long?) the character played by Faye Dunaway has been at the center of a lot of the action, as well as being romantically involved with Nicholson's character, and things have come to a head.  He's grilling her about the identity of the young girl who is also mixed up in the whole thing: "Is she your sister or your daughter?"  Dunaway's character has been sexually abused by her father and so the answer is that both things are true, she is both sister and daughter, but that answer doesn't make sense, it's just a little too strange to be true, it's Chinatown all over again.
Jesus is both human and divine, and it's rather important that we don't do violence to one identity in the name of the other.  Paul Tillich described this as walking a narrow ridge between two chasms, holding in tension the full reality of both identities.
The problem is, in an age of relativist thinking, the two chasms don't seem so very foreboding, they sort of seem like nice little lakes where people are playing and having fun, while orthodoxy is uncomfortably balancing in that awful tension.  On the one side you have the divine camp, where Jesus is just "God in a man suit."  This was and is the hallmark perspective of Gnostics of many varieties.  It just makes no sense that God would or could actually become a genuine human being, so the whole Jesus thing must have been like God just checking us out see what we would do.  On this side you get lots of people who masquerade as Christians, and they will passionately defend their belief in a persistently all powerful, omnipotent God, who could never ever really limit himself so much that he would actually die on a cross.  The only thing to do with this sort of god is to hold on and try not tick him off too much, because eventually humanity is just going to push him too far and boom: apocalypse... you know, because god only has so much patience. On the other side you have all those folks who like the purely human Jesus well enough, but because he's just a guy, we really don't need to actually do anything about our admiration of him, you know, why worship?  Why live out a cruciform existence? Why mess around with all that tension and balancing? Why not just leave Chinatown altogether? It's never going to make sense and it's just going to bum you out.
Maybe this debate really only matters to the ones who choose to live on that ridge and hold those lines, but if it matters then in matters a whole awful lot.
As I stated Monday, on my good days I could follow a Jeffersonian Jesus, no problems.  The days when I need the Jesus of Athanasius, Anselm and Augustine, are the days when the cross looms large, as it does on this Wednesday.  We're getting closer to the betrayal and the denial and the brutality.  The days when suffering dominates the landscape and blackens the sky are the days when I need a Jesus who is both a man in full and fully God.  Funny thing is, on those days, in my experience, I don't need an explanation, I need a presence.  When the only answer is "It's Chinatown," that's when I really need Jesus, fully human and fully divine.

Mysterium Tremendum

In the beginning, God created humanity in God's image.  Since then, it has, with a few very brief exceptions, been the other way around.  Everyone who has ever lived has imagined God or the gods in their own special little way, and no one (except Jesus) has ever been 100 percent right.  The fullness of God's identity remains hidden, and unknowable.  On the whole, this is a good idea, knowledge is power and power makes us dangerous.  There is no better illustration of this fact than the reality of the atomic bomb.  One of the first things we did, when we developed the capability of splitting the atom was make a weapon.  Before power generation or any of the various scientific applications that later came from nuclear fission, we constructed a weapon straight from the pit of Hell, and we used it, on people... thousands and thousands of people, mostly civilians.
The thing is that the people who were developing the bomb, knew that they were messing around with the very powers of creation.  After the first test detonation, code named Trinity (yeah that's right, Trinity as in Father, Son and Holy Ghost), Robert Opphenheimer infamously invoked a the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  Indeed we have spent most of the time from then until now, with a very serious possibility that we could witness the end of humanity with the press of a button.
The power to destroy is nothing compared with the power of creation.  When Jack was a baby we got him a big tub of Lego Duplo blocks.  Our first game was for me to build big towers and for him to knock them down.  Gradually he grew into making things, and now is quite the Lego artisan.  It was fun to watch him gleefully knock things down as an infant, but as his father I am much more satisfied in his creative, constructive ability now that he is ten.
The point of all this is that God knows our nature, and therefore God limits our access to his power.  I would still be unwise to hand my circular saw to Jack and turn him loose to build things, he's not ready for that sort of power, for now, Legos will have to do.
God reveals things to people in small increments, and we should never make the mistake of thinking that somehow way back when, people understood God better and heard God more clearly.  In ancient days only a select few were given access to the divine name, the name that Moses first learned at the burning bush.  The Name was really the thing that Moses wanted before he started his mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.  If you actually trace the arc of Scripture you see that God is certainly not a static character.  That name that God gave Moses is an action: "I AM."
The thing is, burning bushes to the side, God doesn't make a habit of showing up and having conversations with people.  I know the Bible seems to be full of "God said unto..." and "thus says the Lord..."  But the way God really "talks" to people is through something that has been best described as "convictional knowing," which means basically that we come to an awareness of God's will through many channels, and most often they are non-verbal.  In other words, Abram's conviction that he was supposed to leave Ur and go to Haran was probably not as simple as a voice speaking to him out of the clear blue, but he knew it was what he was supposed to do nonetheless.  In telling the story, rather than recounting an entire internal dialogue and enumerating the reasons why their ancestor had left his father's country, the people of Israel simply state that God told Abram to go.  It's simpler, and it advances the narrative without a whole lot of mess.
All of the prophets and writers of the Scripture, including the Gospels and letters of the New Testament, have a specific perspective, and woe to anyone who tries to read their works as objective truth.  Willful ignorance of the human element in all of scripture only leads to tortured and ultimately unsustainable hermeneutics that will collapse on itself and leave us in a wasteland of self-inflicted darkness.  The symptoms of this wasteland are all around us, people using the Word as a weapon, not against evil but against other people who disagree with them.  The Word is not a tool to be used, it is an entryway into a relationship, and a path towards approaching the mystery of God.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that God speaks to people, and I believe that scripture is a primary conduit of that conversation.  I have formed my vocation and my life around a foundational sense of God's Call, but I also know that I never specifically heard a voice.  However, I am sure of the call in way that goes far beyond anything I have ever heard in words.  But I also know that, in my sinful, fallible nature, I could be wrong, and that is important, because it keeps me humble, it keeps me from grasping at power, because I know that I couldn't handle it.
The Old Testament is full of stories of people who grasp at God's power as though it's a tool: Abraham does it, Moses does it, David does it, and they are all convicted of their sin.  When people try to take the power of God in their own hands, disaster almost always ensues: there is no more heartbreaking example of this than the story of Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11:29-40).  Jephthah makes a vow that, if the Lord gives him victory in battle, he will sacrifice whatever he sees first upon arriving at home victorious, probably thinking that he would see a sheep or a goat out in the fields.  But his only daughter comes out to meet him, singing and dancing with bells.
Because he figures that God values a vow more than he values a child...
Oh... crap.
The Bible is a record of people's stories, and God is a factor in those stories, but people, even the "heroes" never actually get a verbatim account of God's will, we are left to muddle through as best we can.  Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes God has to send an angel to stop us from killing our only son.  Sometimes God's anguished cry never reaches a foolish father in time to save a little girl.  Sometimes people think that God wants them to murder thousands of people or even commit genocide, which doesn't actually mean that God wants those things, even if your name is Joshua. We're most dangerous when we think God is calling us to some glorious victory and that there is a divine sanction for our basic utilitarian thought process.
If you think that humanity would magically snap to and stop being so power-hungry if we had more knowledge and therefore had to live with less mystery, you haven't been paying attention.  Our first impulse is to weaponize every single power we get our hands on one way or another.  War has always prompted technology to advance by leaps and bounds.
The essence of God is to be able to create out of nothing, and to speak light out of darkness.  Quite frankly, I know I'm still a long way from being trustworthy with that sort of power.
I'm glad that God holds that terrifying mystery away from us, even if it means that some of us choose to be Atheists, agnostics, or pagans.  As the stories of the Old Testament suspect: One cannot see God face to face and live. This leaves us to live with a tremendous mystery, which should always humble our arrogance and temper our lust for power.
Individual humans have reached inspiring and beautiful levels of creativity, in that there is hope.  But as a species we are still infants, tearing down block towers as fast as others build them.  We are dangerous enough to become death, the destroyer of worlds, but I don't really think that's what God has in mind as a final destination for creatures made in his image.