My New Year's Resolution Considering the War on Christianity is Self-Inflicted

My New Year's Resolution Considering 
the War on Christianity is Self-Inflicted

Rev. Douglas Olds

December 31, 2013

We've just gone through the annual season where certain factions allege a "war on Christmas"-- a proxy skirmish in the so-called larger "war on Christianity."  Now, I don't believe such is the case that a battle exists between me and mine and some mass of outsiders and aliens in this most Christianity-besotted of nations.  I believe instead that this struggle for acceptance that Christians undergo is part and parcel of our claiming a privileged relationship with the One God.  Such an outrageous claim--not meaning untruthful--cannot be passed by easily by the said One God.  If one claims a special, communicative relationship with the Creator of the Universe, it comes at a cost. It cannot be earned cheaply.  Divine grace and salvation is free, but divine friendship and divine closeness in order to speak for the deity is hard won and constantly being re-negotiated on the Sovereign's terms.  The Christian Spiritual Life is characterized by struggle, where the ultimately holy and good infinitude is presumed spoken for the by the limited and sinful finite. When we claim to speak for God, absolute sincerity and accuracy is necessary, and any hypocrisy or error is met with stern correction by our God. God's correction may come from the scoffing and reproofs of outsiders: it is our own Christian presumption and hypocrisies that are in the dock, not God. Preachers have long noted the risks of spiritual injury from lack of diligence to the witnesses of the Holy Spirit operating Biblically and in history.

Therefore, one of the reasons I try to read from the Psalms daily is not to succumb to the propaganda from many of the same culture warriors that the Christian spiritual life is consistently joyful, peaceful, or without struggles. Life in Christ is for me, as for the Psalmist, a struggle for understanding and holy action leavened by consolation, wisdom, and joy. There's no pretending otherwise.

Representative of this scrutiny and relationship struggle is expressed in Psalm 139 (NIV):

      1 You have searched me, LORD, 

         and you know me. 

      2 You know when I sit and when I rise; 

         you perceive my thoughts from afar. 

      3 You discern my going out and my lying down; 

         you are familiar with all my ways. 

      4 Before a word is on my tongue 

         you, LORD, know it completely. 

      5 You hem me in behind and before, 

         and you lay your hand upon me. 

      6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, 

         too lofty for me to attain. 

      7 Where can I go from your Spirit? 

         Where can I flee from your presence? 

      8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; 

         if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 

      9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, 

         if I settle on the far side of the sea, 

      10 even there your hand will guide me, 

         your right hand will hold me fast. 

      11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me 

         and the light become night around me,” 

      12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; 

         the night will shine like the day, 

         for darkness is as light to you. 

The social life of those connected to the God of Abraham is also often absurd.  I am not alone in tending to speak loudly of politics and religion, two taboos in "polite" company. Thus either we tend to be outliers in neighborhood networks, or outcasts.  We likewise tend to be idealists in some historical frame, noting that reality can't possibly be what a good God intends. Thus we tend to be contrarian, suspicious of at least some dominant cultural narratives.  Finally, we can be intellectually cruel when kindness is called for, for example when speaking of rank unknowables--life after death and the inner spiritual life and motivation of others.  

Accordingly, since the War on Christianity is self-inflicted--because it is our outrageous claim to understand and transmit God's will accompanied by God's stern acceptance and correction--my resolution for 2014 is to jettison the certainties while embracing my absurdity with the conviction of kindness. I will fail at times, but I hope all of you will be as ultimately forgiving as the One who in Jesus makes all things new (Rev. 21.5).  May our New Year be the time where the One in our lives and our world triumphs more and more.

You Can Go Home Again: A Christmas Message, without Angels, Manger, and Swaddling Clothes

You Can Go Home Again:

A Christmas Message, without Angels, Manger, and Swaddling Clothes

Rev. Douglas Olds

24 December 2013

Galatians 4.1 (NRSV) My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; 2 but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. 3 So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

8 Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. 9 Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? 10 You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. 11 I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.

When it was time to go to college, I returned to my home state from the east coast where my family was living.  While there, I would make rowdy weekend trips up to my hometown.  Even now, I return to western Michigan every summer, and when I do, I feel the call of the old.  Something in me reverts, regresses even, to my memory of what it was like to be young and anxiety free in my home town.  Even now, when I return, I find myself driving a bit too fast on the back roads.  My laughter is freer, tinged by the broad nasal accent toward burlesque stories shared with longtime friends.  I feel the comfort of the familiar, and it’s not just that I feel younger, it’s that those who know me treat me as I once was.  Louder, less inhibited, more teasing given and taken.

Jesus comments on this phenomenon in Mark 6.4 (Luke 4.24) when he notes that no prophet goes without honor except in his home town.  It’s not only that our “homies” know us from way back, it’s that we slip into the comforts of those way back times.  My alma mater’s ditty, “I Want to Go Back to Michigan (to old Ann Arbor town)” sings of this nostalgia for home.  Our memories of our youthful home, if our childhood was pleasant, are souvenirs of experience.  I cherish these souvenirs—the memory of snowy Christmas eves, of apple cider in the dampness and rage of autumn color, of the gleaming turquoise through the trees of my great-grandfather’s lake as we turned the last corner from the antique cornfield-- I burnish memories by turning them over and over in my memory, searching for new perspectives.  Then I assemble to act out with my friends from the old neighborhood.  But of course, they know me too well to take my changed life in ordained ministry too seriously, and that is both a relief and at times an offense, as I know that I have changed, but I am not so appreciated by them for it.

I try to play it down the middle: I am the same old guy when it suits closeness with my friends, and I am a changed man when my moral commitments demand separation.  Yet today’s Christmas message is that I have to choose one or the other, and that the one role of a gentle and mature separation from my tyrannical and sacrilegious inner child is called for even in the midst of the familiar and nostalgic.

To that end, today’s scripture reading incorporates the Apostle Paul’s minimalist birth narrative of Jesus. Unlike the birth narratives in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, there are no angels, shepherds, wise men, miraculous stars, or apparitions or annunciations in the temple. There is no celebrity mom named Mary. There is no Joseph or manger or inn with animals.  There are no swaddling clothes, or frankincense, gold, and myrrh.   There is no census of Quirinius, or Herod, or slaughter of the innocents.  All of these colorful particulars of the infancy narratives of Jesus are omitted in Paul’s account of the Gospel.  Whether he was aware of these infancy traditions is irrelevant, for Paul’s message has always been the salvific meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross and the liberation of the Holy Spirit for the creation of a worldwide church.  In Galatians 4, Paul suggests the merest outline of an earliest creedal statement regarding what Christians call “the incarnation”:  “when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”  This is certainly the earliest textual evidence we have that contextualizes Jesus’ birth, and it predates all the birth legends in Luke and Matthew.

If we compare the earliest Christian hymn documented by Paul in Philippians 2 (6-11), we note that for Paul the incarnation was a means of freedom from slavery.  God comes into the world by sending his son to lead the people from slavery.  That slavery was to the elemental spirits of the world that had to be kept at bay by the Law.  When freed—redeemed—by adoption into God’s family, we are freed from the Law, which was the proscribed customs and rituals of the Israelite people. By taking human form God is leading the New Exodus promised by Isaiah (Is 40.3). 

500 some years prior to Jesus, the Judahite exiles leaving Babylon thought they were living Isaiah’s new exodus when they submitted to the call to leave their comforts and business affairs there to make a straight way through the 700 mile desert back to Jerusalem and Judah.  Hadn’t the new exodus been accomplished in that move?  By the time of Jesus, the majority of people who weren’t in league with Herod and the Romans were concerned that something was seriously lacking with that exodus.  The people were physically returned to Judah, but there was no Davidic king as promised in their scriptures (2 Sa 7), and God had neither returned to the Temple nor had God spoken to a prophet since Malachi just after the return. They were under brutal Roman rule. Instead, following their return from exile, Ezra and Nehemiah had led the people to restore the Law and to rebuild the ruined temple and city.  The people saw God speaking less through the prophets and more through the decrees of foreign emperors who enabled the projects of Ezra and Nehemiah.

So the first aspect of Paul’s creedal affirmation of the Christmas incarnation is God acting in the fullness, τὸ πλήρωμα, of time.  This image is one of pregnancy, whereupon time had begun counting down to some signal, novel event.  Thus there was a time from whence the countdown started, and a time of fulfillment when time enters into a new phase.  I’m fairly convinced that there were people who read the prophet Daniel (9. 25-27) in this context of a countdown to a new age, to an age of the anointed one:

Dan 9.25 (NIV) “Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble.26 After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing...”

The religious authorities read these numbers as years.  Artaxerxes, in the seventh year of his reign (Ezra 7.8), allows Ezra not only to continue with the restoration and rebuilding of the temple, but Artaxerxes decrees that Ezra, situated in Jerusalem, “possess, appoint magistrates and judges to administer justice to all the people of Trans-Euphrates“ (Ezra 7.25). This required a newly functional metropolitan structure, augmented by Nehemiah who rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls and gates.

483 years (69 sevens) elapsed from Artaxerxes’ 7^th  year is 26 A.D., about our best idea of the time of Jesus’ baptism by John, when our textual witnesses report a messianic fervor (cf. Luke 3.1-7; Mark 1.3-8) amidst both the people and the religious scholars.  The people had almost certainly understood the prophetic scriptures of Daniel’s 69 weeks of years, and likely Jesus did too. Hence Jesus applied to himself Daniel’s appellation “Son of Man.” 

This “fullness of time” that Paul situates the incarnation likely refers to this tradition that Jerusalem’s restoration counted down to a new age of the anointed one.  This pregnant time of the run up to  incarnation of the anointed one thus demonstrates how Israel’s God controlled the history and destiny of God’s people.  God enters into the history of a people’s struggle between faith and faithlessness in the form of the incarnated Son of God.  Unlike for Matthew and for Luke, where faithfulness was found among various people surrounding Jesus’s birth—Mary, Joseph, Anna, Simeon, Elizabeth, John the Baptist, the common folk and Pharisees going forth to be baptized—for Paul, the faithfulness that matters is solely Jesus’.  Whereas for Luke and Matthew’s story of the incarnation, the fact that time was pregnant suggested an optimum moment for God to bear forth in the struggle between faith and faithfulness.  Yet for Paul—concerned with God’s glory and absolute freedom-- the struggle of faithfulness is one lonely man’s against a maximum of faithlessness, whereby Jesus takes on the total incarnated task through his ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection as the Son of God.

The second creedal statement of Paul regarding the incarnation of God’s son is the statement, “born of a woman.”  Unlike in Mark and Luke (and in later developments of the institutionalized church), this early creedal statement shows no interest in the particulars of that woman.  There is no exaltation or even identification of Mary, the mother of God. Paul notes that God is changing time, not creating time anew.  There is no “creation ex nihilo” involved in this change or in this incarnation.  The birth of the anointed Son of God involves the old creation into which God steps.  Yet this involves God in history in a way that God wasn’t prior.  The theological implications of this are enormous.  If the people of faith see prophecy as operating in the old time, then God in that old time--at least for Israel--determined history in some strongly deterministic sense. By stepping into history, God participates in historical contingency and gives up deterministic control. Providence is changed by this divine participation in time.  God through deterministic control of the countdown toward the incarnated Son of God could thus be seen as manipulating history, hardening Pharaohs and other historical actors (Romans 9) to bring about God’s will in history, for God’s purposes.  Yet once God’s enters history in the form of the woman’s offspring, God I believe moves toward the cession of strong historical determination and will become in some sense a participant in the contingency of historical time and human freedom.  Jesus was fated, thus determined, but after God dies on the Cross, the determination of history undergoes a change.  Time changes, and so does God’s providential action in soft power.  God leaves the Aristotelian role of "unmoved mover" and becomes an actor both influenced and influencing. God through the Resurrected Jesus now acts providentially to optimize flourishing and justice within the constructs of an “open, non-determined” history.  God through Jesus, by being born and then by dying, takes on the fate of all God’s human creation through the woman and cannot now absolutely predict or precisely determine the future of God's liberated creatures.

This is the insight of “open theology.” God’s action in Israel was historically deterministic—or at least seen so by the Israelite writers of the Hebrew Scriptures--paying disobedience and sin back with just punishment and the mercy that served God’s purposes.  But this action changed, and has been mistaken by some for the absolute death of God. For the witness of post-Easter humanity has been that the battle between faithfulness and faithlessness has entered a new phase, one where war is more calamitous and justice more postponed. God’s incarnation was costly. Yet at the same time, beauty and peace break out in a new ways that would have startled, I believe, the ancients--and convinces me of God’s continued and active existence.  If God through the resurrected Jesus has died to the old way of being God so to create a new way of being human, then this might not surprise us.  We should expect that God allows freedom for both sin and faith, and that God’s Spirit liberated in the new exodus over the Jordan in baptism would be non-deterministic and open to contingency.  God in Jesus has ceased being the tyrant experienced by the ancients.

So to explore this incarnation into a change of being God by becoming God and human at the same time (as Paul is suggesting in this creedal statement in Galatians 4), Jesus we must note initiates the age of the spirit that is a time of contingency, soft power, and persuasion, not of coercion and force.  The latter is not-god. We who have found adoption into God’s loving household are citizens in that age of the Spirit because of Christmas.  The age of the Spirit is one where mercy takes precedence over justice.  And that is where I find my hope, for myself and for others.  God in Jesus being born of a woman in the fullness of time in order to redeem us by his Word and Spirit is a gentler God than the YHWH of the Hebrew Scriptures.  This is also to God’s glory.  God in Jesus does not give up beckoning and calling gently to our adoption into the Spirit. For those who refuse there is Law--and the awful prospect of judgment.

It is meaningful that Paul contextualizes this early creedal statement about the Son of God’s changing time and becoming human in the form of adoption into a family of prayer. “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ’Abba! Father!’”  (Gal. 4. 6).  The incarnation into time is thus the era of Spirit-filled prayer.  This also suggests the contingency of God’s providential action.  In open theology, God chooses to act in history by intervening elegantly (parsimoniously and beautifully) among alternative futures, in the process not violating the integrity of covenanted human free will.  This choice of God as open to historical contingency thus necessitates prayer as an input for God’s decision making. If we pray for a certain alternative (say sustenance for a poor family which we assist the best we can), we in God’s family add to the desire for a certain kind of future.  Sustaining charity is necessary, but prayer in addition brings God’s mysterious and universal suasion of conscience and soft power into that particular situation for future relief.  The prayer may not be answered according to the time frame that we hope for, but I believe that is because God’s providence is optimizing justice and flourishing amidst a huge number of alternative futures.  Such is the glory of God, and such is the associated necessity of prayer by God’s redeemed family.  This I believe Paul is affirming for us at Christmas.

Jesus during his ministry is leading the descendants of the Israelites away from the old history and into the new history of the spirit. It is the spiritual new exodus. You can go home again, like the Babylonian exiles, but you can’t take up your old life.  You can’t, as Ezra had it, recreate Israelite history in the festivals and the rituals.  We can go home again for Christmas, but we must come home transformed, both ourselves and our understanding of God. We have been liberated by the Spirit from the Law. In my illustration at the beginning of this sermon, I may go to my home town with joy and levity but with separation (which is holiness) from my old way of being when I was under the Law.  I go home again not the person I was when I was a child, but I go home as one who puts away childish things for the sake of the Spirit that dwells within me.  It matters not whether my friends and family accept my transformation or Spirit, but it matters to myself to live with the integrity and the calling of my transformed self.  I may indeed go dishonored in the eyes of my hometown friends, but I look forward to the unfolding grace, flourishing, and productivity of the Spirit in the history of those I touch and pray for.  For me, God has ceased being a tyrant and a bringer of retribution.  I try to live that new history out in all my prayerful deeds.  I am adopted into God’s family outside of the Law, in which there is freedom, peace, and joyous relief from the bondage of sin.

May it be so for all of us this Christmas.

.

Does Your Pastor Carry a Concealed Weapon?

Does Your Pastor Carry a Concealed Weapon?

Rev. Douglas Olds

17 October 2013

“The cross and the gun offer us two very different versions of power. One says that there is something worth dying for, and one says that there is something worth killing for.” -

@ShaneClaiborne

One thing likely to cause a scandal to non-Christians is the news that a church pastor who dons the clerical collar, a Cross, and/or a Robe carries under that garb a concealed weapon, perhaps a loaded gun. And that they may organize a portion their congregation to carry concealed weapons to church.  This causes many inside and outside the church to be scandalized, as isn’t Jesus a peace bringer and a peace maker?  What role does a concealed weapon play in pastoral ministry?  And what, if anything, might the Bible say about pastors carrying guns?

What might convince a pastor that it is legitimate to carry a concealed weapon in his public and private ministry?  The arguments that I’ve found from pastors for carrying weapons  involve three broad categories.  First, these pastors claim that we live in evil times, and that their role in guiding a flock necessitates the physical protection of that flock, which includes the responsibility to bring deadly force against bad guys who might storm in.  Second, they are  convinced that Jesus was not a pacifist, contrary to the common cultural perception, and that the Book of Revelation, certain Old Testament verses concerning David and the temple, and Jesus’ own instructions to the disciples validate the taking up of weapons by Christian pastors.  Third, these gun carrying pastors resort to the claim they are American citizens entitled by the Second Amendment to bear arms.

The first argument for a pastor to arm himself  (or herself?) clandestinely involves a “watchdog” theory of leadership.  This scenario involves the pastor’s followers--the sheep--assailed by wolves who are the bad guys.  Pastoral leadership adopts this secular leadership paradigm so that a pastor is not an especially fearless or spiritually endowed and trained caretaker sheep, or an agent battling evil with words from scripture, but rather a sheepdog who can engage the wolf on the wolf’s terms while simultaneously or sequentially engaging the sheep on the sheep’s terms.  Pastors who conceal a gun under their preaching garb speak the language of violence—some have claimed to “shoot for the center” and “won’t be cowering behind a pew when the bullets start flying” all the while claiming allegiance to agape love.

The second argument for pastors taking up concealed weapons is that Jesus was not a pacifist, at least in the modern understanding of the term.  These pastors argue for a fuller rendering of the Godhead’s power than afforded by a simple view of a putatively peacemaking earthly ministry of Jesus.  This understanding of the supposed violent power of the Godhead comes from a warrior’s reading of the Book of Revelation.  Notoriously difficult to interpret, so much so that even the prolific John Calvin refused to produce a commentary on the Book, Revelation promotes itself to pastors  who are drawn to the language of violence so that they may claim a prerogative to carry concealed weapons.   The fact that others read these as metaphors or allegories of violent battle in Revelation does not matter: they are alleged to be outsiders to the true Revelation of God’s historical plan. Pastors who read the Book of Revelation as justifying and demanding preparation for a military earthly battle validate concealed weapons on their person from the basis that they have a justifying understanding of the “full reality of Christ.”  This knowledge of Jesus as part of the Godhead’s supposed eschatological violent battlefield power gives them warrant to accrue concealed weaponry for application to their pastoral ministry, always justified by the duty to protect the flock.

Isolated Old Testament verses, it is proposed, support this view of God’s commissioning of weaponry.  The writer of Psalm 144.1 is asserted to be David, whom they see is an Old Testament "type" of Christ.  Since "David" writes in Psalm 144:1 (NRSV)

1           Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle;”

 it is interpreted that Jesus is trained in the military arts. (Of course, such a claim ignores that "David" stops speaking through the Psalms at Ps 72.20 so that Psalm 144 is not Davidic).

Another isolated Old Testament verse is proposed by armed pastors:  Nehemiah 4:16–18 (NRSV):

16 From that day on, half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and body-armor; and the leaders posted themselves behind the whole house of Judah, 17 who were building the wall. The burden bearers carried their loads in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and with the other held a weapon. 18 And each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side while he built. The man who sounded the trumpet was beside me.

In this verse, the builders of the second temple were authorized to build while armed, even to build with one arm holding onto a weapon. Here we are to meant to see sacred construction is blended with outfitting for physical battle. 

The third argument for pastors claiming the authority to carry concealed weapons is that they are citizens of the United States, and as such, they have that right under the second amendment to the Constitution.  I found in my challenge to armed pastors when the Biblical arguments failed for justifying concealed death dealing weapons, almost to a man (and they were all men) they reverted to their citizenship rights to bear arms in America.  It seemed to me that my challenge to them was a prelude to stripping them of the second amendment rights which they hold precious.

There are many arguments against “inverted reading” of the New Testament that seeks to engage weaponized violence to go back to Old Testament projects.  First, the Book of Hebrews seems to me clearly to warn against a return to Temple building of a physical kind.  Thus the quote from Nehemiah as a directive would be mooted for Christians. Second, reading David as a “type” for Christ also is very problematic.  What “type” means is unclear (though Col 1.15 uses similar language when proposing that Jesus Christ is the image for the new man, not David).  Also, David (who, historical critics argue, may not have written this particular Psalm) was a sinful and haunted man according to the accounts in the books of Samuel and Kings. In no way is he a model for the sinless Christ of our Confessions or for the renewed and reconciled person discipling and struggling to put on that sinlessness.

In my discussions with them, gun wielding or gun permitting pastors agree with me that some references to “sword” in the New Testament may be allegorical while other references are literal.

For example, Matthew 10:34–36 (NRSV)

34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

    35      For I have come to set a man against his father,

    and a daughter against her mother,

    and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;

    36      and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

In this quote we can clearly discern allegory.  Otherwise, a literal reading is that the sword in this passage is brought to bear against relatives in an aggressively literal manner. This cannot possibly promote “family values.”

In the book of Revelation, so studied by these pastors who are drawn to and speak the language of violence, the first three references to swords occur in Rev 1.16, Rev. 2.12, and 2.16.  None of these first references refers to a literal battle sword.  They are symbolic or allegorical.  Yet how do these pastors move into the later narrative of Revelation to pick up a current historical reading of literal swords?  The Book of Revelation is a confounding mix of symbolism, heavenly proposals, and seemly concluded history, and it was for John Calvin a closed book--one for which he refused to write commentary.  I’ve read and translated the Book of Revelation from Greek and I am likewise not opened to its spiritual and supposed earthly meaning, but I am agreed with one pastor who noted that "Revelation offers no warrant for violence, bullying, or killing by the earthly disciples of Jesus Christ."

Now, there is a New Testament passage read literally by gun concealing pastors to show that Jesus arms his disciples, Luke 22:35-7:

35 He said to them, “When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack anything?” They said, “No, not a thing.” 36 He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. 37 For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless’; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.”[2] 38 They said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.” He replied, “It is enough.”

The gun concealing promoting pastors with whom I discussed this verse appeal to the “plain meaning” of verse 36-- that Jesus wants his followers to become armed.  Yet I read verse 37 as directly relevant and contextualizes the previous verse.  Two swords are “enough” to fulfill the prophecy that he be counted among the lawless.  Verse 37 is related to verse 36 by the Greek connective γὰρ [1] so it has to be asked, what is the scriptural fulfillment from Isaiah 53.12: “and he was counted among the lawless”?  It was that two swords were sufficient for such a purpose.  Jesus is controlling his destiny by the calling for swords.  My exegesis is that Jesus is not carrying a personal sword up to this point.  Two swords are shown to him, two swords are enough for him to guide fulfillment of the prophecy of words from Isaiah 53.

Are disciples permitted to bear arms?  Perhaps from the reading of verse 36 they are. Christians may serve in the military and police if they sense a calling.  But are pastors?  Pastors who appeal to verse 36 in Luke 22 ignore a more germane reference in Matthew 26. 47-56, specifically how a mob carrying swords surrounded Jesus.  These swords were manufactured for the purpose of deterrence, protection against animals, and perhaps in extremis man-to-man combat. Note how verse 52 uses a strong construction to redefine the teleology (the end purpose or final cause) of the sword:

Matthew 26:47, 51–52 (NRSV)

47 While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; with him was a large crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the people. ... 51 Suddenly, one of those with Jesus put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. 52 Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. 

Verse 52 is a command (imperative: ἀπόστρεψον) that redefines a sword’s “place:” εἰς τὸν τόπον αὐτῆς  The eschatological prophet--our earthly Jesus--has redefined the eschatological place of the weapon for "those with Jesus." It is to be put away in the Kingdom he is inaugurating as he moves toward his destiny.  Disciples who take up arms will die by those arms, Jesus warns.  Pastors who take up arms, I believe, also violate their eschatological Kingdom call.

As Chris Hedges notes, people who speak the language of violence are liable to take up arms and act out their violence.  Threats are serious, threats backed up by weapons more so.  As I mentioned above, some pastors resort to images of hyper-masculinity to justify their concealing guns beneath their robes, crosses, and clerical collars.  One minister said, "I have to wonder what kind of man hides in the garb that signals to the world that they are messengers and agents of what many, including me, understand to be the Prince of Peace while themselves bearing a concealed death dealing weapon on their person.  What kind of man does that?" To which I add:  And is that kind of man you want around children?  Is a church service with attendants carrying concealed arms spiritually and physically a safe place for your children?  Not for mine.

Other quotes from pastors who promote concealed weapons include, “the scriptures are silent on whether the earthly Jesus carried a sword, so pastors are permitted either way.”  I don’t recognize the Holy Spirit in an argument from silence, and it conflicts with my "plain understanding of the whole" of the New Testament as well as my exegesis of Luke 22.37 outlined above.  Another statement was made: the Bible [including the Book of Revelation] reveals the “full reality of Christ.” Yet we who believe in a living God--in a living Christ--cannot conceive how a creature can make the claim that a written document of some limited number of sentences reveals absolutely everything (“full reality”) of the Living, Eternal God.  And how could a limited creature claim that he or she could understand with complete certitude such a full reality?   And how is it that these literal readers of an inerrant Bible disagree so radically about the Book of Revelation-- its times and prophecies?  See here and here for more discussion about the incoherence--really the scandal--of various Biblical fundamentalisms.

As Chris Hedges and Erich Fromm note, violence reveals a deep yearning to escape freedom.  Literal , bullying readings of the Bible are like violence in that both settle matters to a point of inertness.  Bullying takes the living spirit from those who are different from a norm and turns that spirit into coldness, distance, and silence.  Bullying the scriptures likewise kills the spirit of deliberation and the spirit of freedom to pursue joy and happiness, as well as service and neighborhood.  Shooting a gun at a provocation founded on anxiety or rage also takes away from the Living God to settle the dispute according to God’s Living operation of Justice and reconciliation that we have in Christ.  Pointing a loaded weapon also silences deliberation as it bullies and creates anxiety in others.  One step earlier in this sequence of bullying is carrying a concealed weapon. For it takes one step from concealment to pointing, one more step to firing.  How would that process proceed?  Would it be a process of the Holy Spirit who according to Gen 1.1-2 and Mark 1.10 initiates new life? Or would it be a process of fear?  Would the pointing of a gun, even ostensibly to protect life (“for the children of our church”) initiate the new life of those children protected? How would those children who witnessed a church shooting by their parents' revered pastor take that memory forward into life?  Rather, isn’t the process of concealing to shooting a concealed gun by a pastor one of both taking the physical life of an alleged bad guy and damaging the spiritual life of witnesses?

For me, the answer to the question of concealing a gun during my ministry is obvious.  For me and my  house, while we are on earth we will serve Jesus who preached the Sermons on the Mount and the Plain and is the Prophet of Eschatological peace and wholeness, through whom I am saved by the announcement of the forgiveness of sins validated by the gift of His Holy Spirit and the reports of His cross and resurrection (1 Cor 7, Col 1, Lk 23.24, Jn 1.1-5, Gal 1.6-10).  Accordingly, I will bless peace and peacemaking, neighborliness and care of the sick and hungry around me.  I cannot do that authentically and with integrity if my spirit is burdened by the false sense of security of a concealed, human made death device.  Those who live by the Spirit will live. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.  I won’t exchange my discipleship of the Lord of Heaven and Earth for citizenship in Bible thumping  2^nd Amendment Exceptionalism.

The urge to assert our wills over that of others is part of our human tendency to tyranny and oppression. Our desire to assert out wills in the creation of a god with the same enemies as our own is part of our human tendency to idolatry. If you're at all concerned, ask your pastor about weapons and instances of congregants carrying guns.  Demand the truth, for God is a God of light and truth, not a God of concealment waiting to get the preemptive or retributive drop on you or your neighbor the moment hostility is detected. My Presbyterian Church (USA) has a wide ranging policy where our churches prohibit or guide toward the prohibition of guns carried into our churches. Check out http://www.presbyterianmission.org/gunviolence/

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[1] “For.”  There was no punctuation or verse numbers in the early Greek manuscripts of the New Testament so that our English Bible's creation of a verse 36 and 37 makes a separation where there was none in the Greek.

[2] Resolving the differing manuscript witnesses to the fulfillment of Isa 53:12 contextualized in

Luke 22:35-38 OR in Mark *15:28 has significant ecclesiastical and moral import. https://carm.org/king-james-onlyism/was-mark-1528-removed-from-modern-bibles/

The Politics and Ecclesiology of Nonsense

The Politics and Ecclesiology of Nonsense

Rev. Douglas Olds

“Modern Foolishness is not ignorance. Modern Foolishness is the absence of doubt about convention.” --Gustave Flaubert

"Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust."  -Voltaire

The Observer Effect in physics notes that there is no closed system that can be studied without involving the observer of that system.  Both the system and the observer are changed and involved once the relationship is established. I wonder if, as an implication of the "Observer Effect" in physical systems, we stop paying attention to political theatrics and stop participating in the immediate polling measurements of those theatrics (whether by Gallup or by "likes" on Facebook), then the farce of our current governance would revert to some semblance of historical and deliberative sanity.  By posing this question, I'm not advocating citizens become ignorant to what matters, but that we avert our eyes from the nonsense so that narcissists no longer run for elective office, and serious people are free to take a longer-term view of our nation's common good and future. We turn nonsense into a black hole. No longer would we respond to grandstanding, publicity seeking, electoral handicapping and horse races, trial balloons from "highly placed sources," and celebrity-obsessed media profiles of the hobbies, habits, and haberdashery of officials.  We would instead focus solely on the substance of policy deliberations, like here, devoid of personalities, so that the mere fact of our observation of policy would change that policy in the direction of the majority of the observers' intentions. If government has any claim to be a rational system, substantive Observational Politics would serve both seriousness in solving real problems and democracy.

Now Observational Politics is not sufficient, but it is necessary, to humanizing national life.  It is a foundation for both community organizing for political reform and for individual petitioning the courts and government agencies to restore Constitutionality when rights are transgressed.  Observational Politics such as I propose requires an informed citizenry so that education supports citizenship beyond indoctrination into marketplace consumerism.  Education for citizenship would promote seriousness of public action and reflection and would give citizens the tools to engage the substance of policy alternatives (not the personality or leadership qualities of policy sponsors) and make confident choices among them.

In a real sense, this call to education and Observational seriousness is identical to a call by pastors for their congregations to read the Bible.  Serious pastors, as opposed to narcissistic posturers, know that Bible interpretation is too important to the salvation of sinner and society to be left in the hands of one authoritarian claimant who rules the pulpit.  It is those churches that accept without reflection or fact-checking the claims of their pastor that he or she is the bearer of proper interpretation and authority that seem to me to lead their followers toward theological nonsense. Some theological nonsense: that our Lord wants a military showdown in some area of the globe in order to launch Armageddon, and that we in the church ought to not only pray for such a showdown, we should promote it by supporting and enabling militarists in society. (Or that the Gospel is get rich scheme.)  I am confident that if churchgoers read the Bible, most of us will understand that the Sermon on the Mount has not been superseded by the Two Swords Doctrine of the Constantinian Papal Church. More simply stated, I believe that the more churchgoers read the substance of the Bible, the more they will be convinced of the peacefulness of Jesus's teaching and will better be able to reform or ignore the authoritarian pastor's assurance that Jesus wants an authoritarian dominion on Earth (or North America) won by force of military or police arms. Such a dominion was tried in the Middle Ages in Europe, with the consequence of oppressive politics enacting simony, purchasing your loved ones out of Hell, and barbaric and homicidal penance.

Through a study of history and my theological tradition, I believe nonsense and authority have been inextricably linked.  A role player in an authoritarian system cannot allow himself to be seen as fallible, and thus rare is the question  from below that is met with the humility of "I don't Know, " or "It's a mystery to me and mine, what do you think?," or "I commit to get back to you," or "More study clearly is needed," but rather the authority resolves to elevate his person, office, and produce above the free and critical thought of others. Nonsense results. When nonsense fails tactically, I'm afraid that punitive retribution and violence is the alternative of quick resort.  So that when nonsense is present, there is underneath rarely if ever the humility of a vanquished inerrancy, but rather the narcissist-authority's need to remain on top heedless of the costs to peace and justice. Nonsense thus should not in every case be laughed at or ridiculed. It masks and precedes something more sinister.

My theological tradition grasps this in its teaching about the demonic force opposed to the Goodness and Rationality of the Creation.  The Satanic Adversary is a trickster, accuser, and a death-dealing rapist by turns, veering among the tactics of authoritarian domination. From my study of it, war is engaged by many of its truthful participants and diarists as an intensive mix of these demonic features. The testimony of PTSD and Guilty Survivor syndromes suggest that the hyperviolence of the battlefield is characterized by a nonsensical pattern of who lives and who dies.  The outcome of battle is impossible to predict regardless of the resources applied, and it is germane to this chaotic nature of war that history's most economically and technologically advanced (and nominally Christianized) military has failed to vanquish a national enemy since 1945 (save Grenada and Panama in the 1980s).

War is demonic and  all-too-rapidly evolves into total war, which is completely demonic.  Our current American society is haunted by war; it has become a massively militarized society and economy beyond historical precedent (I include homeland security, surveillance, contractor, and debt on present and past wars to the economies of direct corporate purveyors of militarism).  U.S. wars have recently been long-lived, pre-emptive and aggressive in contradiction to U.N. Charter and thus violate global standards of humanity, and have involved the targeting and torture of non-combatants, both violations of the Geneva Convention ratified by the U.S. and under Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution illegal.  These situations can cause existential distress and even dysfunction in all but the most ignorant or spiritless of citizens and civil society.

Added are the implications of pervasive lying by the militarized and surveilling authorities regarding the rationale for constant war-- the nonsense, authoritarianism, secrecy, punitive incarceration and harsh prosecution of misdemeanors,  Truth appears to be the first casualty of war, followed inevitably by war fatigue that causes Observational Seriousness, oversight, and accountability to wane. Yet it is during war that we must be most serious and vigilant, most committed to the written, sworn, and non-alterable records and requirements of multiply sourced, reliable hard evidence.  The features of the demonic are linked, and their rapid escalation in society since 9/11 suggests that nonsense, authoritarianism, lying, and punitive violence come together when a society is in danger of rapid decline or outright failing--when the demonic has gained a tactical victory and critical toehold in society.  As Conservatives often claim, the U.S. may indeed be under God's judgement.  We can argue original causes.  I will say I personally shudder for the fates of the architects of preemptive war, torture and domination based on lies who hypocritically hurl the accusation of personal irresponsibility at those honest folk made jobless,impoverished, limbless, orphaned, childless, mentally disabled or ill by the ravages and the structural adjustment of the debt- and derivative-financed war economy. Compared to this, any putative sin attested to (homo)sexuality bringing forth God's judgment on America seems to me trivial and insulting (more nonsense!) to human suffering and to God's righteous name and glorious love.

Yet if our society is in a fitful or rapid decline brought on by these forces, the demonic has a meaningless victory, like Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. For the peace has already been settled. Peace will prevail.  God has so mandated from the Cross of Christ. The meek shall see it.  Opposite of authoritarian narcissist, the meek know the power and the promises of God.  The meek have no truck with the demonic, and thus are serious, without nonsense (though not without levity), without insincerity and without death-dealing weapons.  They do not punish, but they forgive and turn the other cheek.  By these, you shall know them. And by their opposite you shall know the dead.

Avert your eyes from nonsense. Observing it sucks you into its black hole.  No good can come from nonsense.  There are no tactics to learn from it. Walk on the other side of the street from insincerity.  Demand a higher burden of proof from those justifying aggression than from peace workers.  Become educated into the substance of policy and less focused on honors, medals, and testimonials attributed to celebrities. Don't be afraid to come out of oppressive institutions, to start telling the truth if you've been captive to lies. Jesus has proclaimed release to those captives. It's not too late to come forth from their prison.  Dream of what you can gain--treasure and an integrity of character that survives death. While it's often been said that the only thing certain about life is death and taxes, I believe to that we should add truth.  The liars cannot win.  That's certain.

“Windfall”

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo (CA)

4 August 2013

Lessons: Deuteronomy 8:11–20, Luke 12:13-21

"Principle First, Money  Afterwards"

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo (CA)

30 June 2013

Rationality vs. "Rapture"

Rationality vs. "Rapture"

Douglas Olds, April 18, 2013

[link:] 'Rapture Politics' Harnesses Rightwing to Doomsday Horsemen

Christians who desire peace and wholeness need to name the doctrine of "rapture" (where the parousia of Christ precedes the end time tribulation for the non-faithful) for what it seems to me: a misinterpretation  of scripture that has been co-opted by dualist reporting. As the media and the establishment ridicule followers of Jesus' message of love of neighbor, they simultaneously enlist Christians into support for nuclear hawks in the Middle East and elsewhere.  

"Rapture" is a speculative doctrine of certain "dispensationalists" novelists that Christians will in the final battle be "caught up" in the clouds to meet Jesus, a moment that escapes the tribulation of the End Times and its violence and temptations.  "Rapture" is both escapist and utopian: it allows Christians to escape responsibility for being peacemakers and for protecting life on earth because they bear no consequence for how and when the world takes a turn toward catastrophe. It's as if the so-called righteous act out their irresponsibility for "the total depravity of everybody else."

Yet even (especially) Christians have the responsibility to be intelligent, to love God with all our mind[i], to test the "doctrines"of leaders (1 Jn 4) for their fruit of peacefulness, patience, compassion, and gentleness (Gal 5.22-3; Col 3.12-3).  A doctrine that tempts Armageddon does not fulfill this test.

We Mainstream Christians who think should demand that establishment reporters stop this calumny against Christianity--that so called "rapturist politics" is either mainstream or that the mainstream supports a message that hastens, bluffs, or tempts death.

The media and the whole of rational Christianity needs to reject this kind of magical thinking for the sake of life and the planet. 

 "Rapture" is not a Biblical word nor is it a promise to Christians that they will escape the tribulations of death or the end times. In fact, Jesus in the Gospels (Lu 21; Mk 13; Mt 24) repeatedly makes plain that Christians may suffer most.  "Rapture" as a doctrine that suggests that Christians are trying to bring on THE END is a scandal to those whom we must evangelize with the message that Jesus has overcome death for all of his followers.  Not in this life, but in the resurrected life. In this life, we are to work for PEACE and LIFE.  1 Thess 4 does not absolve us from that work and that commitment.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post:

Jesus Christ, the Word of God, did not see himself as equal with God and thus was objectively humble... Jesus denied knowledge of objective truth in matters of "times and places" (Acts 1.7, Mt. 24.36), yet that does not stop some of His Armageddon-anticipating followers from claiming (or responding to) this as predictive knowledge.  Are the repeated frustrations of expected dates of Armageddon in fundamentalist circles enough to demonstrate the limitations of  "objective truth" claims in religion?  It is in my and many others' estimation.  These predictions are a scandal to outsiders to whom we must announce the message of God's plan of overcoming death.  Jesus warns us against these! Why is it still going on?  Why do we try to hasten the end by promoting forces seeming to bring on Armageddon?  That is not my meaning when I say, Come Lord Jesus.

  

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[i] Mk 12.30: ὅλης τῆς διανοίας  all discriminating reason.  Jesus adds loving God with all our dianoia to the Shema of Deuteronomy 6.4, to love God with all your heart, soul, and might.  This is a condition of the New Testament Age: to be rational and discriminating in the Love of God, because there is the human temptation of the flesh to follow all kinds of leaders that promise to think for us, to be self-satisfied and irrational.

Where I Find Hope: the Fourth Day after Easter, 2013

Where I Find Hope: the  Fourth Day after Easter, 2013

Douglas Olds

April 4, 2013

Well, that was quite a Lenten journey.  How about for you?  And thanks be to God that we are blessed with life and living hope from our faith and the testimony of a cloud of witnesses (Heb 12.1-2) to the resurrection of the Son of Man: Jesus Christ who is revealed to be the author and bearer of human salvation, the redeemer from the curse of death, the Word and Son and Lamb of God. He is risen and living among us and with God, together sending the Holy Spirit from unseen light for guiding and sustaining our mission. Trinitarian power, mysterious and wonderful. Amen and Amen, as my friend Douglass Fitch says.

Today’s Presbyterian Lectionary includes this First Reading from Ezekiel 37:1-10 (14), so influential to the resurrection hopes that our church looks to today:

[1]The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of

the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.

[2]He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and

they were very dry. [3]He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I

answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." [4]Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these

bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. [5]Thus says

the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall

live. [6]I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and

cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall

know that I am the LORD."

[7]So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly

there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.

[8]I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and

skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. [9]Then he said to me,

"Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says

the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these

slain, that they may live." [10]I prophesied as he commanded me, and the

breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast

multitude.

--[DAILYLECTION email list of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for April 4, 2013].

Earlier this week, Monday in fact, I spoke with a young woman from Petaluma, up the road from my home in southern Marin County, California.  Her name, which I am withholding for her privacy, was an Ethiopian word for sweetness, honey, and wine.  She had a cast on her left forearm and the fingers on that hand were askew and out of alignment. A purple and deep scar ran down from her exposed elbow and disappeared underneath the covering of her cast.  After exchanging some details about my life to her, she told me her story of her arm.

Four summers ago, while driving on Mt. Tamalpais (a prominent landmark in our county), she had a severe car accident.   Her car flipped and rolled, settling off road where it was unpaved and wild.   Emergency teams rescued her and medically evacuated her to a hospital by helicopter. She would undergo 26 operations on her arm from that day to the present. More to come, in all likelihood.  She averaged an operation per month for the first year and half as the doctors first worked to save her arm from amputation and then to reconstruct its function.  She never lost hope, and she aimed to be out of the hospital before 100 days of inpatient treatment.  She was released on her 99^th day. Upon release, she lost fear of losing the arm, yet to this day she is struggling with chronic pain and has flashbacks to the accident that causes her anxiety.
 

She smiles brightly as she tells this story, not sardonically or fatalistically. It is a smile that seems to me filled with something beyond a simple faith.  Her story is alive and breathing in that smile. I asked her where her hope comes from. “From my arm, it is healing.  And I’ll tell you something.  For four months after the accident, my arm was ejecting twigs and glass and cattails that had been ground into my arm in the accident.  A two inch piece of glass came out after 4 months, and that seemed to finish all the stuff I had in me.”

I had never heard of story like this.  I had heard of transplant rejection, where the body rejects the organ of a (non-related) donor.  But here is an account of the resilience and tenacity of a human arm.  My new friend told me a story of an arm's overcoming inert and dead matter.  She told me her story of a resilient and tenacious spirit, as well. Resilient and tenacious life.

This story gives me hope.  Life overcomes the inert.  I wonder what those who place their hopes of enhancements by implanting technology into the body might make of this story.  

Again, here is the breath of life and spirit of this hopeful young woman overcoming the dry twigs and the fired silica sands of her own wilderness experience.  She is persevering. She says both the pain and the function of her fingers are getting better, and in that she finds hope. 

“And you know what else?” she went on. “I had this dog, a small, shi..y dog, and I’m lying in the hospital and I’m thinking I’m going to have to get rid of him when I get back home. He brought me nothing and he didn’t behave.  But when I got home, it was if he was waiting for me.  He was all attentive and turned into a great dog, a companion.  He’s at home waiting for me now.”

My young woman friend tells me this story on the day after Easter, April 1, 2013.

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[Skip down to next line for more hope. The next section is on the challenges of destiny.]

"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."  This quote of Edmund Burke has been adopted into the tradition of eternal recurrence that "Christianity’s most perceptive critic"[i] F. Nietzsche proposed was the fate of the earth.  Destiny.  To me that suggests lack of freedom, lack of autonomy, and the ever-frustrated will to escape through domination. These signal lack of humanity.  Destiny is that which leads inexorably to death’s final word, where only the self-assertions and self-promotions in this life matter in the eternal memory of the earth.  Destiny lives on in the memory of the earth.  Note the negating multiplier in Burke’s quotation as it goes forward from the present: ignorance of the past brings on destiny, yet we know that our destiny is to die.  It is our ignorance of what happens after death which is intolerable. 

Therefore we must commit ourselves to knowing fully the past and overcoming ignorance. We turn away from present and the future, so that we may be absolutely certain we've won the past.  If we feel ourselves slipping in the present, we must commit to even deeper strata of memory, to deeper lessons of myth, archaeology and paleontology.  And primatology. Yet the lessons we learn are of the dead who are no longer here.  Even a method that uses the experiment that involves the death of organisms analyzes the effect of death of the living preparation. Death drastically intrudes into the animal or plant, though we may think we have just halted the life process in mid-stream and thus are studying life.   We study ever more the act and effects of death in order to prepare for enhancing life.  And there is no more "fertile"study of heightened preparedness for meeting destiny than in war.  And no more eternal assurance than total war.  War then becomes the peak experience of living. 

Negations of openness to the future--the ignorance and the focus on memory--turn us into backward looking creatures, learning our lessons from ever deeper strata of the past in order that we may hold on to our grasp on security. Ignorance of the future and memory of the past are correlated forces, so that the more we divert ourselves by the study of death and thus turn from musing upon destiny, the more we think we control the past. If only we can control our fear of death do we presume to have a place in the eternal earth. We bluff, we take addictive substances, we arm ourselves to the teeth.  Anything not to discern that nature involves something other than total struggle.  Eternal recurrence is not a living testament from a living God.  It is a dead earth.  It is an earth run as a business undergoing a fire sale, in liquidation, with no care for future generations, no stewardship ethic, no concern for a greater good outside of warrior ancestors and warrior sons.  The earth is plundered and set ablaze in a ritual of death that celebrates the victorious ancestor. The dead may live again unless the heirs catastrophically cede control of the present.  Existentially, then, each present moment is devoted to control. Parents teach children war so that the parents may live again. 

From my vantage as a confessing Christian let me therefore suggest a reconfiguration of Burke’s popular quotation: “those who repeat history are destined.”   These are those human moral nihilists who deny bearing the image of a peaceful and just God and thus try to impose their will on the living through domination or trickery toward their fantasies of the past, either in  nature balanced solely by brutality or in some effortless paradise (powered by slaves or parents). The Hebrew and Christian scriptures repeatedly demonstrate that these are the ideas of dying Pharaohs and their dead imperial idols destined not to share in the living eternity. The living God won't have it. The living God desires progress in peacefulness, in courage, in commitment to life, in neighborliness so much that especially the fear of death be conquered. And that fear, to be vanquished, has to be unexpectedly conquered, by embracing death meekly through acceptance rather than going out in a blaze of self glorying violence. Only by this demonstration that includes a final blessing of forgiveness (the "victory of the Cross")  may we escape our tendency to domination and relentless slave driving. For if we don't have hope for life after death, we wall off from life, turning away from being thankful for the sustaining function of  nature. We expand total war to include a war on nature which we blame for our deaths. And the only way we can strategize against that nature is to create atavistic myths of fierce hominids or hominoids or whatever predator species we claim to understand.

Yet at Easter, we Christians testify to a hope of something better here and now and something truly good after death because we have tasted and experienced God’s goodness in the blessings we have been given.  Those blessings includes the Good News of Easter and the gospel of Discipleship as we make our way towards death. We have a living hope and we have a trust and faith that helps us be alive, open to the future, not consoling ourselves by ever more revisions of the past that trap us in an ontology of death. Yet there is a way out of that trap, and we preach it in the Gospel every Sunday.

Our hope as human beings, it is clear to me, is in our bearing the image of God: active in history but constant in love and trusting that a Good God has a plan announced in the Gospel for reconciling humans with their God and with each other. What we make of that image and plan and experience of God's goodness shows us our eternal destiny.  We are not programmed, though if God chooses, who can resist? I believe and trust that God preserves all present acts of love and justice eternally.  We have a future if we commit now to repent from our will to cling to the past that only confirms time's and life's passing away.  

Who among us feels that we do not have free will?  If not--if no free will--is regret for any past action even possible? I testify to regrets, because I have misused my freedoms to impose my will for something that denies freedom to others.  My conscience convicts me.  Whence comes that conscience?   I believe professed atheists when they testify they have a moral center and shy from doing harm to others. They too bear the image of God, though they may exchange it for idols. Even Christians who settle for a god stuck in the rut of past historical action--or worse, frozen historical roles--are subject to idols.

In a way, we all are challenged by this year’s calendar.  Is the earth, in the throes of a human induced major extinction event and resource shock, global warming, and the rattling of weapons of mass destruction, really fit for eternal human habitation? How then can destiny give any sense of hope or be the basis for any rational commitment?  The alternative that asks no question that suggests meaning or purpose to life is in view, nihilism, is not on the moral plane of Hamlet. It is instead the suggestion that the only play in life is the tactic of Russian roulette, only that we may presume upon the ignorant "niceness" of those inclined to intervene when we put the gun to our or someone else's temple and start threatening to pull the trigger. Nihilism in the face of destiny is lethal.  But who cares?  Who really cares?  As George W. Bush, after creating an Iraqi insurgency, taunted, "bring 'em on!"

We are also subjected to a petty choice by the calendar this year: April 1^st, the day after Easter. We Christian fools went back to into the world committed in and communicating our Easter hope.  We holy fools.  That is the date I received the story of the young woman with the tenacious living arm and smile. I acknowledge a possibility that Christians are deluded in whole or in part--we all have our bouts with doubt. Jesus only seems not to doubt, though he struggles with fear and with temptation.  That consoles me: God has chosen to share the struggle of humanity facing the inevitability and destiny of death. I do not write with bad faith. I believe in God's goodness.  I believe that my faith has experiential and historical warrant.  

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During Lent this year, I noted the hopeful trend that our government leaders seem to changing their stories in a way that acknowledges what I believe strongly to be true.   These are good steps.  See here, here, here, and here for examples of officials recently changing their public testimony.   The political economic situation is  very fragile, but at least the truth telling has begun in government and it’s not possible to go back to the old denials.  The political economic system continues to rob many of hope and security, but we must forgive all truth tellers, because eventually from truth comes goodness.
 

I read this story in a hard copy newspaper on April 1. It tells a vignette of an ugly social reality in the recent political economy. But I find hope in the truth telling and the commitment that this past will not stand in 2014. This story suggests that leaders have the opportunity to commit to progress, to protest the ugliness of injustice. We all have the responsibility to commit to progress. I see signs of this commitment blooming and taking root in many sectors.  I am hopeful. Truly hopeful. Momentum is building. I have some anxiety of the cost of forgiveness and reconciliation that truth tellers and those who have been politically and economically excluded must go through, but the process has started. There’s no going back. Not possible. Thanks be to God.

So you who are holding out:  whence comes your hope?  Are you hiding your witness in order to fight the liars with lies (or amorality with amorality), to come out of your secret places and claim you were on the side of truth and morality all along?  We church folk have to forgive you, too. That's our task as we welcome you into the God-bearing image of repentant humanity. Yet consider the path of reconciliation involved in that course of fighting fire with fire.

I am hopeful. Hallelujah.  No exclamation point in 2013 without counting my blessings in the present.  Hallelujah! The road to reconciliation is long and hard.  Consequences don’t vanish without reconciliation, and even then possibly not entirely in this life. We don’t forget, perhaps especially our own complicity. Yet, I don’t claim to be a victim, so I don't fully know the contours of memory of the truly brutalized: the raped, the orphaned and widowed, the maimed, the dispossessed, the traumatized. I can accompany and learn from these as they tell their truth. I believe them. They bear the scars of the myth of destiny, and their telling the truth gives us all hope that they can and will triumph over that myth.

Where there is a spring tide of truth and hope there is life. That Easter Spring tide is here, blooming in the open light. Amen to truth where ever it emerges, and Amen to hope. Jesus is indeed risen for me to commit to life here and now. 

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[i] Charles Hefling, “Why the Cross?”Christianity Today, March 20, 2013, pp. 24-27.