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.

Good Friday

Our congregation does not have a Good Friday service, so unlike many of my colleagues, I had Friday to do the normal sorts of Friday things. Friday is my day off and I generally use it to get things done, in this case the agenda was getting my 60,000 mile service done on my car. I know that going to a dealership is expensive and takes longer than going to Jiffy Lube, but since I drive a VW that has some fancy features, I like to take it to the dealer about every third oil change.  But I know that it's going to shoot my day in the face and probably my wallet too.  I needed four tires and alignment done in addition to the usual "routine maintenance" which is not cheap so I kissed about half of my tax return goodbye and settled into the waiting room with a book to read and tried to make the best of it.
The waiting area was not crowded, so that was a plus, but the TV was on way too loud, and it went from some vacuous morning talk show over to one of the cable news channel, thankfully not Fox News.  I shared the room with several older black folk, two of whom were a married couple who were quite talkative, even as the wife was intensely engaged in flipping through a well worn and tabbed Bible.  Over the course of several hours, mostly just by hearing (eavesdropping, though you can't much help it in such a circumstance) what she said, I came to be rather charmed by her honest and compassionate ways, and I could discern that her Bible was actually being put to use as more than just some sort of decoration.  For instance, she was rather upset at the story of the day involving Laura Ingraham and David Hogg, the conservative talk show host and the 17 year old Parkland student.  The former had made disparaging comments about the latter not getting into some of the colleges he had applied to, and the latter and his gang of newly fledged social media warriors proceeded to call for people to boycott sponsors of the former's talk show, prompting an immediate, if if somewhat insincere, apology from an adult who had decided to mock a teenager about not getting into college. The story is a pretty standard example of the decay of our public discourse, but this dear woman had it in her head that the colleges who rejected this young man were the ones at fault before the talk show host ever put her two cents in, which is wrong, but the fact that her heart works that way was touching.  In her mind, the colleges rejected Hogg because of his involvement with the March for our Lives movement, which is probably not true at all, the timing is just all wrong and colleges reject student applications all the time, it's nothing to cry about, although I still hold a grudge agains Duke for not taking me.  I listened to this conversation and I loved this woman for her compassion, if not for the rectitude of her opinion.
I am not generally a person who gets involved in waiting room conversations of this sort, partially because I am aware of my tendency to sound like a know-it-all and also because wading into political or even tangentially political discussions these days is likely to be fraught with danger.  So having sat with these folks for several hours, listening to their good natured chit chat, there was a certain sense that I had about them: they were sincere and faithful people who seemed inclined towards kindness more than anything else.  She was a retired DC school teacher, he was a retired workingman of some sort.  She was working on something involving the Bible and it was a difficult assignment that had been given to her by the Bishop of her church. 
In comes another younger black woman who sits for a while and then notices the Bible in the hands of the older woman.  It prompts her to ask if the older woman has read Enoch, which is part of the Apocrypha, and at this point my spidey sense starts to tingle, this is not going to go in a healthy direction I fear.  Sure enough, the younger woman has some sort of fascination with extra-biblical texts, probably because they are not part of the boring old Bible.  She had some (mistaken) ideas about the structure of the Hebrew Scriptures like not really knowing the difference between Torah, Tanaach and Talmud, and they are after all T words that relate to the Old Testament somehow or other.
I was a little worried because the older woman's knowledge of the Bible was being put to the test by someone who was not using their knowledge of the Bible in good faith, but in a sort of trivial manner where simply knowing who Enoch was and that he apparently did not die (questionable assertion given the actual text, but not unique to her).  She started talking about how Enoch was one of the two witnesses, people who did not die who were supposed to do something important in some sort of end-time scenario.  Now my "bad theology" radar was blaring, and I had a window to jump in because neither of them could remember the other person who did not die according to the Hebrew Scriptures.
"It was Elijah," I said, conscious of my own tone and voice, trying to keep it low key and not patronizing.  "Elijah was taken up into heaven by the chariot as Elisha, his student watched him go."
All of them looked at me like I had just sprouted out of the sofa, "And it was actually Elijah and Moses who were the witnesses to the transfiguration of Jesus on the Mountain," I said trying to bend this story back to a place of actual Biblical reality.  I did not immediately identify myself as a pastor, I still didn't want to take the stand of the expert.  What I did do is volunteer my actual knowledge of the Bible, I did sort of wish I knew a little more about Enoch, but the Apocrypha is not a particular fascination for me.  I found that even the dear woman with her well worn King James Bible, had a very limited understanding of how things all fit into the narrative.  Her training had been in verses and pericopes and proof texting, carefully guided by her Bishop.  She was prepared to teach and preach to fellow believers, but she was not adequately prepared to face what I think was some sort of modern day gnosticism coming from a very enthusiastic and certain person.
My involvement, and my ability to inject actual Christian doctrine into the discussion actually drew this loving, sincere woman to remember her own faith with more confidence and as this happened I sensed more uncertainty from the younger woman.  She was not as zealous for her love of Enoch as a world changing text, and she made some excuse to vacate the waiting room.  The older woman then told me that she was, in fact preparing for an examination before a board of ministers to be authorized to preach and teach in her congregation, which was the difficult assignment she had been fretting about.  It was only then that I told her that I was, in fact, an ordained person who had been through seminary training.  I told her this because I wanted her to know that I understood how nerve-wracking facing the gatekeepers can be.  But I was glad I waited until this point because from that point forward she actually started taking notes about what I was saying, which totally changed the dynamic of the conversation, and then I was teaching.  By now it was just the three of us in the waiting room and I had just about had enough of trying to read and more than enough of listening to the news.  I asked her about her assignment, which was clearly giving her trouble, it was about filtering your thoughts.  I thought about how appropriate that could be to what just happened with the Enoch lady, but I decided not to disparage a person who had clearly left our little dialogue, so I told her about the practice of contemplative prayer and accepting thoughts as they come, but weighing them against the need to love and forgive.  She had been going down the road of trying to control "sinful" thoughts and trying to think only good and righteous things.  I told her this was a path to futility, and that instead she should examine those "sinful" thoughts and find out if there is a righteous way to deal with them, for instance meet angry or bitter thoughts with forgiveness.
Before I knew it, we had been talking for more than an hour, and their car was done, and mine was nearly done.  I believe that our mutual presence there was no coincidence, it was the way that God works, and even if it required me to be a bit more of an extravert than I normally would be, it was my place and my calling to be there.  It was a Good Friday.

Close to Home

Last night I was asked to speak to a group of politicians and people running for office this year on behalf of our local community action group.  The other folks speaking had statistics and programs and laws to talk about, I just had a story about an old car, specifically my old car, a 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier.  A marvel of American manufacturing it was not, and it required having a good relationship with a mechanic I could trust.  I talked about the mechanic who helped me keep my beat up old Cavalier running until it had nearly 200K miles on it, he could listen to the car, or your description of a weird behavior and tell you what needed done.  I was speaking to a group of politicians on behalf of a group of people who are mechanics when it comes to some of the broken things of our society, churches, charitable organizations like the United Way and community action groups like Lifestyles of Southern Maryland, we deal with the symptoms and breakdowns of our culture.
Collectively we tried to impress upon the politicians and aspirants in the room that we are doing pretty much everything we can to treat the symptoms, but my point was that we are still driving around in an inherently flawed, poorly designed vehicle like my 84 Cavalier.  We are living in a system that is making all kinds of noises, I think we may have thrown a rod (which I have experienced in my wife's former car, an 81 Buick Skylark, probably one of the only cars that was actually a worse car than my Cavalier).  With regard to last night, the symptoms are people experiencing poverty and homelessness in the midst of an exceptionally prosperous and expensive area.  The system is broken because a household with two wage earners at the $30,000/year threshold ($15/hr, 40 hrs/wk) still falls below the average cost of living in this area by $15,000.  The system is broken because we have numerous people in this county living without safe drinking water or even running water and/or indoor plumbing.
One of the politicians, in true politician fashion asked us, "what change do you think we should make?"  To which the leader of our little gang of do-gooders sort of threw up her hands and said something on the order of, "I don't know and I'm too busy trying to help people to stop and figure it out."  I told the politicians that we are simply too busy and often overextended in trying to help the people who are hurting to think of grand new ideas, and also that we know that the solution to poverty in general is not simple, quick or easy.  We can do our best to fight the crises that inevitably arise with the clunker of a system we have and we can learn to make the most of it, but we need them, the ones we are voting to give access to the actual design of the machine, to come up with the solutions to the problems.
This morning I woke up to yet another shooting incident at a school, this one is less than 45 minutes from my house, it is in St. Mary's County, where some of my congregation work in the schools and at the base at Patuxent River.  This is another place where the system is broken. I have heard a lot over the past few weeks in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, from many sides of the issue, about what needs to be done.  The conclusion I have come to, with regard to the eruptions of violence in our society, is that like poverty, the solution must be more than one thing.
However, our engine is smoking and our transmission is making disturbing grinding noises, there is definitely something wrong.  So guns are not the problem, but honestly they are not part of the solution either. (Note: in the case of Great Mills, it is being reported that an armed School Resource Officer, did confront and use a firearm to stop the shooter, so point for law enforcement on this one)  Mental health is definitely an issue here as well, but it is not anything like the root cause of this sort of thing.  The problem is a system where people can feel so alienated from their world that killing others out of pure malice seems like a good option.  Access to firearms increases the deadliness of these incidents, mental illness is certainly a part of this pathology.  We lack two things on a systemic level:

1. A real grown up dialog about what place guns should have in our culture.  I do not believe that preventing citizens from owning guns is the solution, not here, not now, probably not ever, but if we're going to live with the guns, we need to make sure that we do a better job keeping them in the proper hands, that may require some rigorous and maybe unpopular work on our laws.  The State of Maryland, in my opinion, already has some of the more sane restrictions on the purchase of firearms: waiting periods, background checks and all that stuff.  The guys at the range will complain about how freedom-killing these rules and regulations can be, even as they unpack their AR-15s and various other semi automatic boom sticks. Obtaining a gun in Maryland is neither easy breezy nor impossible, which seems about the right place to be in my opinion.  This happened in Maryland, where we have pretty good rules, so what that tells me is that rules aren't going to solve this problem altogether. What I'm talking about as a grown-up dialog is actually something that I remember used to exist not that long ago. When I was growing up and learning to shoot and hunt, the NRA was an organization that taught you to respect firearms and most of all to use them safely and responsibly, which seemed like the majority of their purpose. There was some mention of the Second Amendment and the rights (and quite a bit about the responsibilities as well) of gun owners, but mostly it was about how to avoid shooting something you didn't mean to shoot. These days they seem to be peddling fear and anger more so than safe hunter training; this, in my opinion is a devolution of their mission.  When I was 14 the NRA represented the grown-up telling me about always pointing the muzzle in a safe direction and triple checking to make sure a gun was unloaded before you did anything. Now that I'm the grown-up they seem to be like 14 year-old boys harboring violent fantasies about defending the American dream with machine guns blazing.  The needed conversation has to happen among the people who know guns and use guns and understand that they are indeed tools, dangerous tools designed to kill things.  It cannot be had if we're busy practicing every rhetorical fallacy on the list in order to prove that we're right or if we let our inner helicopter parent inclinations to just try and make everything super safe win the day.
2. On the mental illness front, it needs to be said that people with mental illness are no more likely to be violent towards others than the general population.  It also needs to be said that someone who is willing to go shoot school children is certainly a psychopath and probably also a sociopath.  We do not have a very good screening mechanism, nor do we have abundant treatment resources when it comes to the kind of severe dissociative problems that would put someone in a place to do such things. We are mostly busy trying to treat depression, bipolar problems and general anxiety that are manifesting at alarming rates among us, especially among youth. As we are learning was the case with the Parkland shooter, there were warning signs and even shouts that something might have been amiss, and yet the system failed to respond in a meaningful, effective way.

Honestly, I don't have any brilliant solutions to this problem, but I'm feeling like this rattling coming from under the hood is not a good sign.

The Persecution Solution

You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy," but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?  Do not even the Gentiles dot he same?  Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5: 43-48 (NRSV)

If you have some time, I suggest you read Michael Gerson's exposition about the recent history of the part of the church that is called "Evangelical." Warning, it's a bit long, because how we got from the abolitionists through Reinhold Niebuhr and ended up with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is not simple, nor is it particularly salubrious to hope and faith.  What I have found interesting lately is the place that persecution is playing in a lot of our cultural neuroses.  Which is funny to me because honestly, in the history of the world, Americans are probably the least persecuted group that have ever existed.  That's not to say there is no persecution, you could certainly point to racism and discrimination of various stripes that seems to echo persecution, but the thing that's important to remember is that disagreement does not equal persecution.

For instance (and I will strive for balance here), a university professor giving their student a poor grade for spouting liberal talking points is not persecution.  Neither is the government saying that we can no longer force school children to pray or say the pledge of allegiance. Neither is a church deciding that they will not publicly endorse same sex marriage or say that abortion is just a wonderful right that every person ought to have. Neither is a major newspaper writing stories about the misbehavior of a powerful politician. These things are points of disagreement, and maybe even moral arguments, but they are elements of an ongoing dialogue about who we are and what our values should be.  In fact, one might argue that these things are precisely the opposite of persecution. 

The interesting thing I have noticed over the past few days is that whole bunches of people on both right and left feel persecuted, and the peculiar and almost laughable thing about it is that one of their favorite things to do is to mock people who feel persecuted on the other side of the debate.  So Fox News and NRA TV love to rant about the "liberal Snowflakes" at colleges and universities, even as they rave about how Obama (he's not even president anymore) and the "liberal media" are trying to oppress them and their freedom loving ways.  And indeed there are "Snowflake" types who seem to be just itching to get offended by anything and everything, so you have inevitable backlashes against #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, not just from the right but from the left as well, and you do have student groups protesting conservative speakers.  The thing is, none of this amounts to actual persecution, as long as you can turn on a TV and see both MSNBC and Fox News, and as long as you can read both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, persecution is really a word we need to stop using, because it is an insult to people who actually are persecuted.  Not only that, but allowing yourself to feel persecuted when you are actually only facing disagreement is toxic over the long haul.

The men who wrote our Constitution were actually intimately familiar with what persecution looked like, and were rather keen on preventing further persecution from happening to them.  British Colonialism and European culture in general was super good at persecution and oppression of various sorts, which was (at least in theory) a large factor in why some folks were willing to brave the hardships of the "undiscovered country." Sadly, these refugees from the monarchy and religious wars, who felt the sting of the lash of persecution did not have such a problem inflicting it on other people though and so Native Americans and millions of Africans found themselves on the wrong end of the musket and the whip in short order.

Despite their failings though, they envisioned and drafted a legal code that was against persecution to it's very core.  Once you say, "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," you can try to argue and say that it only means white men, or that it only means male humans, or that the list of rights that are "inalienable" is pretty short, but if you make that statement in the preamble to your legal foundation...

Let's just say it's only a matter of time before black folk, women, and all other sorts of humans that white, landowning men may not have envisioned making such claims.  If we are trying to live up to the ideals of our nation and it's laws, we must put away our idolatry of the "founders and their original intent," they were not perfect, or supernaturally moral people.  We should, however, appreciate the fact that their work was rooted in an ideal that was more divinely oriented than they could have possibly imagined: a place on earth that mirrors the justice AND grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.  In the Bible, this place is described as the Promised Land, but notably it is always a reality that remains a step ahead of the people. The Promised Land was most powerful and most holy when the people were striving to reach it, once they cross the Jordan and "inherit" the land, they immediately become the oppressors and the persecutors.

This cycle repeats itself in Scripture, and throughout human history: oppressed people rise up (in Scripture, God rescues them) and grow to the point where they are seemingly "ready" to take charge of their own destiny.  Inevitably, they mess this up, because they forget what it was like to be oppressed and persecuted and, despite God's impassioned pleas, they fall in love with power and wealth and grow enamored of violence towards their rivals.

Many of Jesus' followers were looking for a Messiah, as in a revolutionary leader who would help them rise up against a whole bunch of oppressors.  They had a bunch of them: Herod and the Sanhedrin were taking advantage of them from within their own house, the gentiles were an ever present threat, and Rome was the epitome of what the dominion of gentiles would look like.  It was an ever present temptation for Jesus to take the Satan's bargain and become exactly what most people really wanted him to be: a strong leader and a mighty king.

All he had to do was start naming enemies, and beginning the process of revolution.  He had angel armies and probably could have raised a human army in pretty short order, he could have made the world his own personal empire and justifiably called it the Kingdom of Heaven, but it would not have been, because God doesn't play favorites, he makes the sun rise on evil people and good people alike.  God's equanimity can be especially annoying when you really want God on your side, but forgetting to love your enemies is a huge mistake.  I admit, when I think of people who I label my enemy, it is really hard to imagine loving them, and thus I think that maybe Jesus means this as a sort of end point of enlightenment, where mostly only martyrs and saints really live, but I have to admit that maybe it's not an end point but a foundation of an actual Kingdom of Heaven.

Learning to live in a place where people have real freedom, and can disagree with you, is a rather challenging thing.  The wretchedness of our current state of dialogue and politics is a testament to this difficulty. The solution to this difficulty is not, and let me say this again, it is NOT persecuting your enemies.  An important first step in not becoming a persecutor is perhaps learning what persecution is and is not.  Disagreement is not persecution, laws that allow others to disagree with you are not persecution.  Being asked to forbear others who disagree with you is not persecution, laws that restrict your ability to harm people who disagree with you is not persecution.  Persecution is the restriction or violation of another person's "inalienable rights," which are defined by our constitution as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The practice of law in our society is, at its core a way to litigate specific places where one person or group's "rights" come into conflict with another person or group's "rights."

The brilliant thing about "loving your neighbors" AND "loving your enemies," is that you can then treat those conflicts and friction points as exactly what they are: opportunities to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, rather than places to exploit, oppress and persecute others.  They might even seem like places to offer a self sacrificial act for the good of society.  Maybe that seems crazy, even to some people who claim to be followers of this Jesus character, but he did actually mean it, and it is actually a shockingly good idea, it could even get us truly out of this mess that we're in.

 

A House Divided

But this command I gave them: "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you."

Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but in the stubbornness of their evil will,

they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward.

From the day that your ancestors came out from the land of Egypt until this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me, or pay attention, but they stiffened their necks.  They did worse than their ancestors did.

So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you.

You shall call to them, but they will not answer you.

You shall say to them: "This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips."

-Jeremiah 7: 23-28 (NRSV)

Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls upon house.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 11:17b

The theologian Karl Barth said, "Take your Bible and your newspaper, and read both, but interpret newspapers from your Bible."  I agree with that advice, but I will warn anyone who would take up the discipline of trying to do so, it is going to trouble you greatly.  Barth also is reported to have taught that we should do theology with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, but I would not refer to what happens from this practice as theology, that term is too sterile. What happens when you read the Word along side the news of the day is that you are very likely to hear a prophet's voice speaking to you.

The two bits of Scripture above are not cherry picked for my purposes, they are the assigned readings from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel for this day in the Revised Common Lectionary.  I have been following the lectionary for the purposes of preaching for quite some time time now, and I will tell you that it very rarely lets me rest easy when the waters of our world are troubled.  Sometimes it seems almost spooky how the text for a given day or week applies to something happening in the world, given that these texts are selected by what has to be the most boring and un-mystical thing ever: a committee.

The words of a prophet are always there to correct us, whoever we are and wherever we are.  Notice in Jeremiah above, you could find a critique of conservatives in the statement: "in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward."  You could also find a critique of liberals in the line: "This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God, and did not accept discipline..."  And honestly you could apply the last bit, as well as the Gospel to our entire political scenario at this moment: "The truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips."

This is not, by the way, an isolated example.  This is a daily occurrence when you do what Barth recommended.  It is enough to drive you a bit nuts.  It will certainly get you in trouble with ideologues on either the "left" or the "right."  It will run you into some places where you find you must simply be un-patriotic and admit that your nation, whatever that happens to be, cannot and will not be synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven.  It will also sometimes lead you to an almost delirious hope that if only the people would change their hearts then God's mercy would surely rescue them.  AND it will often remind you, with brutal honesty, that you can say or shout all these things until you're blue in the face, but ain't nobody gonna listen to you anyway.

Rules and Regulations

This is another one of those "overflow" blogs, where I've been working through something for a sermon or a teaching and I just have a few things I want to add that maybe don't need to get into the actual finished product.  The Lectionary Gospel for today is Matthew 5: 17-20, from the Sermon on the Mount, which pretty much means that it is heaps of trouble for people who want Jesus to be a mascot for whatever mix of prosperity and imperialism they prefer.  It reads as follows in the NRSV:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets: I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all is accomplished.  Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.  For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

 It is tempting to read this with whatever hermeneutic lenses suit you best and sit back and assume that people who disagree with your way of reading have obviously strayed into error and become those who will either be "least in the kingdom," or better still not get in at all.  But please notice that this is part of a longer teaching, and unless you believe that Jesus was as poor a public speaker as certain public figures today, who jump disjointedly around from soundbite to soundbite, you must also consider what leads to this and flows from it.
The Sermon starts with the Beatitudes, which present the upside-down "blessings" of the Kingdom.  The entire scheme being introduced here is that God is present with us in some of our most unpleasant places. It is the beginning of the unpacking of the Good News that God is with us.  Jesus is going to spend much of his most famous teaching challenging the way we think things work and offering those with ears to hear a different paradigm for understanding.  It is no different for the Law.
What Jesus pretty obviously challenges in the Sermon on the Mount, is the idea that just following the rules is "good enough."  The Beatitudes are a challenge thrown down to people who would claim God's blessings upon power, authority, success, wealth, and suchlike. Jesus then proceeds to insist that we must be salt and light and a city on a hill, people who live kingdom lives must stand out.
The foundation of such distinction is the Law, the simple rules of living a God-oriented life, distilled in the Ten Commandments, which I will list in the form that I find most helpful to remember:

1. Have no other gods, One God is absolutely enough.
2. Don't make idols or even representations of divine things that might become idols.
3. Don't use my name in sloppy or profane ways.
4. Keep a Sabbath, because rest is Holy, even God rests.
5. Honor your father and mother.
6. Don't kill other people.
7. Don't have sex with people you're not married to.
8. Don't take other people's stuff.
9. Don't speak falsely, especially if it will harm others.
10. Actually, don't even get jealous of other people's stuff, that just leads to more trouble, and usually to breaking rules 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Now, there are 611 other no-nos prescribed by the Torah (611 also the numerical value of the word torah in Hebrew, Rabbis sometimes have too much time on their hands), plus commandments one and two, bringing the total number of laws in The LAW to 613.  That's an awful lot to remember, and honestly a lot of the rules were pretty obscure and prohibited fun things like tattoos (because pagans tended to have tattoos that essentially amounted to idols on their skin), and eating pork and various sorts of seafood, which honestly would be a deal breaker for me.

Fortunately for me and my fixation with Maryland Crabs and southern BBQ, Jesus actually summed up the law in a way that allows me to both endorse the goodness of the law and the prophets, while elbow deep in old bay and pulled pork, again I will paraphrase:

Love God with all that you are, and love other people too.

That is really quite brilliant, because if you go back to the original 10, you will notice that everything is covered by those two little rules.  Nothing passes away, in fact, I would go so far as to say that those little rules are pretty close to universal.  People might argue about the definition of God, maybe even try to deny that there is such a thing, but ultimately we come face to face with a the reality of something that is beyond ourselves, and we have a choice: love it or hate it.  If you hate it, you will be in Hell, always and forever, as long as you exist.  You will be forever at odds with your own nature and the nature of everything that is and you will be always be cursed.  If you can't love that which is at the heart of being, how could you love anything?
Conversely, as Jesus points out, if you do not put that love of God into practice with other actual beings and things, you can't really claim to love the source of their being.  In other words, if you don't get the reasons for the law and grab a hold somehow of the fact that God's love is at the core of it all, you can't possibly hope to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  The scribes and the Pharisees, along with legalists throughout time and space, have surgically extracted the love from the laws, sucked it out and spit it on the ground like it was snake venom.
The rest of the Sermon on the Mount is more or less a description of what actually following the Law would look like if it was done completely and consistently. He certainly does not ease up the requirements, in fact, he makes them even tougher in the rest of Matthew 5 (Matthew 5: 21-47).  Jesus' life is a demonstration of putting that description into practice. Being a follower of Jesus is a lifelong practice of learning the truth and putting it into practice, both things, always and forever, and they will never pass away.