Paying Your Vows to the Lord

Paying Your Vows to the Lord

A sermon on Acts 2 and Psalm 116

Rev. Douglas Olds

Church of the Redwoods, Larkspur, CA

4 May 2014

 Acts 2:14a, 36-41

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,

36 Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah,h this Jesus whom you crucified.”

37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers,i what should we do?” 38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40 And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” 41 So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

            

Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19

    1      I love the LORD, because he has heard

    my voice and my supplications.

    2      Because he inclined his ear to me,

    therefore I will call on him as long as I live.

    3      The snares of death encompassed me;

    the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;

    I suffered distress and anguish.

    4      Then I called on the name of the LORD:

    “O LORD, I pray, save my life!” …

    12      What shall I return to the LORD

    for all his bounty to me?

    13      I will lift up the cup of salvation

    and call on the name of the LORD,

    14      I will pay my vows to the LORD

    in the presence of all his people.

    15      Precious in the sight of the LORD

    is the death of his faithful ones.

    16      O LORD, I am your servant;

    I am your servant, the child of your serving girl.

    You have loosed my bonds.

    17      I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice

    and call on the name of the LORD.

    18      I will pay my vows to the LORD

    in the presence of all his people,

    19      in the courts of the house of the LORD,

    in your midst, O Jerusalem.

    Praise the LORD!

The novelist Walker Percy in 1971 wrote Love in the Ruins.   One of his characters (p. 320) muses, “Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?”

Our two Scripture readings this morning answer that question—to what the 3000 Jerusalem converts in our Acts text ask Peter and his brothers, “What should we do?” They’ve just been cut to the heart by the recognition of the Holy Spirit which leads them to understand that they’ve participated with the Roman authorities in Jesus’s death.

 The Psalmist in Psalm 116 has undergone perhaps an even more severe psychological experience within the “encompassing snares of death, the pangs of Sheol’s distress and anguish.” In both cases, the holiness of God has altered their outlook on sin and trust, and both Peter and the Psalmist propose repentance—what the Hebrew bible calls Teshuva—for going forward.

Teshuva is a restitution or ritual thanksgiving sacrifice.  As the setting for the later thanksgiving, the Psalmist has “called on the name of the LORD:   

 “O LORD, I pray, save my life!” …

    12      What shall I return to the LORD  for all his bounty to me?”

The question of the Psalmist, “what shall I return to the Lord?” is like the question of the Jewish converts to Peter, “what should we do?”  For the Psalmist, it is to offer a sacrifice in the temple where he “lifts up the cup of salvation” in thanksgiving, while Peter instructs the Jerusalem converts to [Act 2.38] “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him

             Note that for the Psalmist, lifting the cup of salvation is a form of thanksgiving eucharist in a temple setting, while Peter starts with a theme that is not “seeker sensitive” but employs sacramental suasion as well: repent and be baptized.

 The psalmist repents, committing to pay his vows to the Lord.  What does repentance under distress and anxiety look like?  The Jerusalem converts who appeal to Peter and the brothers are counseled to repent and be baptized, to experience the water closing over their heads while calling on the name of the Lord.There’s more to repentant faith than anguish, and that is restitution, Implied by the Psalmist’s question, “What should I return to the Lord?” Going beyond: “What, Peter, should we do?”  Repentance involves not only the anguished crying aloud of the Lord’s name, but the vow of restitution to make amends for one’s sins. 

Luke, who wrote Acts as well as his gospel, earlier tells the story of Zacchaeus,  the short in stature tax collector who hid in a tree in order to see Jesus and was bidden by Jesus to come down and dine.  [Lk 19. 8]  Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” 9 Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house.  For Luke, it is not enough to change one’s mind. For receiving the cup of salvation it is necessary to make a vow for restitution for harms already inflicted. 

[Interpretation:]  "Remorse" is a feeling that the Jerusalemite converts, Zacchaeus, and the Psalmist felt. Remorse is composed of regret, of feelings of failure to act consistently according to one’s moral standards. That feeling is the precursor to repentance. We read in the Psalm and may infer from the Jerusalem converts that  repentance encompasses feelings of being trapped or forlorn, of anguish, and of despair at theirs and our own lost sin­fulness, as well as a feeling of being alienated from God and from our own deepest spiritual foundations,  of having set aside our own inner authenticity and integrity. The Hebrew tradition of the rabbis notes that recognition of sin and remorse, if they are done without desisting from sin and taking vows of restitution,  do not constitute teshuva per se, only its first steps.[1]

Repentance requires restitution for salvation to take hold--for our feelings of remorse to lead to restitution, which requires us in repentance to act on the regret by making vows to “return to the Lord.”  Recognized between the allusions and parallels of our readings, repentance is the preliminary, and baptism is the fulfillment that leads to salvation. After baptism we approach the cup of salvation in communion with an inventory of our repentance, for as Paul notes in 1 Cor  11.29  all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.

            The promise of salvation is for all, but it requires each of us to respond with the active vows of changed life for the promise to have effect.  For if we continue in our old ways of sin,

we will live lives of anxiety not knowing fully if our relationship with God is active.  Covenant life in baptism and communion requires repentant faith.  We are justified by that repentant faith, but we are sanctified by our acts.  The Psalmist recognizes the essential need of making vows and carrying them out for a right and thankful response to the saving actions of God.  

 Ps 116.14:  I will pay my vows to the Lord  in the presence of all his people.  Just as Zacchaeus makes his vow of restitution in public, the Psalmist too notes the public nature of restitution.

           This public nature of the Psalmist’s vows of repentant faith seems to me to require a public purpose.  It is not, I believe, in view of these texts to pursue vows of abstinence from private vice alone, but rather there are both public and private virtues that are to be lived out in the Kingdom of God.  Justice and peace in the land and community must be the object for our vows to the Lord.

      
           [Illustration:] May 31 is the 125^th anniversary of the Johnstown Flood, one of the seminal events of the 19^th Century. It was, according to David McCullough’s history[2] of the event, a signal moment in the development of a public ethic of natural use of land and of class consciousness. 

The body of water that flooded Johnstown, Pennsylvania that day was constrained by a poorly designed,  72 foot high mass of stones and lead rebar and pipe, much of  the rebar having been scavenged over the years and repaired by mud and hay. 

The lake that the poorly engineered dam created was used for a wealthy person’s fishing and hunting resort, which included as members executives in Andrew Carnegie’s and Andrew Mellon’s businesses, including Carnegie himself.  People in Johnstown had been living with the existential threat of a flood for close to 30 years after it was initially constructed, though insiders and outsiders marveled at how sailboats could glide among the Allegheny Mountains in a flooded valley 420 feet above the plain of Johnstown.  At each heavy rainstorm, the mood in the town would approach hysteria, soon to die down as the rains ebbed. 

Yet when the unusually heavy rainstorm on May 31 took hold, the dam burst and the lake flowed forth from the fractured dam with the volume of flow of the Mississippi River, destroying all in its path and killing 2209 people.

            I bring up this event for its lessons and current parallels.First, in the inevitable law suits, the hunting club was revealed to be undercapitalized and paid out no restitution to families for negligence.  Second, after expressing little remorse for his participation in the exclusive club, Andrew Carnegie, the country’s second richest man, by September pledged the second in his soon to be long list of libraries to the reconstructed Johnstown.  Carnegie had only pledged one library heretofore, and that was mostly a political act to support one of his associates.  Carnegie made a move of restitution to the Johnstown community such as we are discussing today.

Third, there developed in jurisprudence afterwards the doctrine of strict liability for unnatural uses of land.  Building a sailboat lake high in the mountains failed Adam Wesley  Powell’s definition of a natural use for land. 

In the Johnstown Flood, we see the beginning of an ethic of restitution by Carnegie while at the same time changing the corporate structuring of limited legal liability.  The men of the corporation were fabulously wealthy, but the corporate entity itself was sheltered from legal liability for the unnatural use of land. 

The fourth thing we learn from the Johnstown Flood and its after effects is that a limited liability corporation protects from public scrutiny the motives and knowledge of its shareholders.

The fifth thing we learn is that an act of God will eventually fulfill the catastrophe which an historical record of possibility the land demonstrates. It takes only eyes and an historical consciousness to see that the valley received 100 year rainfalls (or earthquakes) on the order of every 100 years.  Give nature long enough time, the catastrophe that overtaxes the shoddy and the unwise will materialize.

         
             [Application:] We are seeming now to relearn these lessons about unnatural land use in the case of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster from March 2011.  Questions are being asked how the plant could be designed with suspended spent nuclear fuel pools and built on land given to earthquakes and tsunamis.[3]  

Like the hunting club above Johnstown, the Tokyo Electric Power company appears undercapitalized for the cleanup, and the Japanese government has since passed an expansive State Secrets Bill that muzzles investigative reporting, potentially including the condition of the nuclear reactors and the alleged failure of remediating nuclear waste runoff from the damaged reactors.  The government has moved to make whistleblowing a crime.[4]

Yet, as we’ve learned from Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, Thomas Drake, and others, sometimes publicizing negligence and criminality is part of a public act of restitution. 

Whistleblowing is an act of confessing that one has been involved in or known of negligence or criminality and then acts to publicize those events in order that they might not happen again.  It means taking a risk and put oneself on the margins of society without the protection of anonymity.We learned from Ellsberg of war crimes in Indochina, from Manning of negligence in the drone strikes that killed innocent bystanders in Pakistan and Yemen. 

In the case of Fukushima, people in Japan and on the West Coast of America are living with the existential threat of catastrophe when a so called act of God might come forth within the parameters of historical probability, say a more localized powerful earthquake or another tsunami.  Living with the threat of a flood of radiation from the damaged power plant is like that of living according to the threats posed by the damaged dam above Johnstown, though perhaps even radically more threatening and unanticipated.

           In these cases, making a vow to the Lord is something we do when our conscience is scarred by complicity, and fulfilling that vow is taking a risk so that the harm is not repeated. 

The Psalmist speaks of making a vow in the presence of the people. The vow is a public act, and thus has some public good associated with it.  For me, the recent turn of the Japanese government to criminalize whistleblowing if it employed against investigations into the case of Fukushima Daiichi’s precarious  and leaking condition, and the recent turn of the Obama administration to criminalize whistleblowing of secret government actions by prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act are troubling.[5]  These prosecutions are troubling inhibitions of the impetus to come clean, to make vows to the Lord in front of all the people that have a public purpose.

[Conclusion:] I believe these texts from our scripture lessons today speak of the necessity to make vows, take risks, go public, and reduce harms by publicizing the operations of the secretive and liable corporate state.  I believe these texts of repentance, remorse, restitution, and public return are to be applied by all Christians toward a political ethic that opposes the criminalization of whistleblowing so that negligence that imposes unnatural uses onto the land and harms onto its people are halted. 

Secrecy that seeks to evade liability and accountability is the exact opposite of paying vows to the Lord in front of all the people, the opposite of repenting in order to be baptized into the peaceable and just kingdom of God. May such secrecy and evasion not be so for you and me. May we live into our baptisms by being people who make the public vow, for bringing in God’s world of peace and justice.  Amen.    

---

[1] Blumenthal, David R. Repentance and Forgiveness. Cross Currents 48 no 1 Spr 1998, p 75-82.

[2] The Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story behind one of the most Devastating “Natural” Disasters America has Ever Known. New York: Touchstone, 1968.

[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident/ accessed on 27 April 2014.

[4] http://enenews.com/insiders-state-secrets-bill-meant-to-suppress-fukushima-news-japan-public-stunned-citizens-could-face-years-in-prison-toxic-leaks-into-ocean-seem-unstoppable-must-plug-information-leakage-ins  accessed 27 April 2014.
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/06/obama-abuse-espionage-act-mccarthyism

FESTIVE LOVE

FESTIVE LOVE

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Don’t look for someone to complete you, look instead for someone you can love completely. 

[Here is the sole lectionary selection from the Song of Songs in the Reformed Christian church calendar.  I invite you to sometime spend 20 minutes to read the full text of the Song of Songs:]

[Song of Songs 2.8-13]

      8 Listen! My beloved!

         Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains,

         bounding over the hills.

      9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.

         Look! There he stands behind our wall,

         gazing through the windows,

         peering through the lattice.

      10 My beloved spoke and said to me,

         “Arise, my darling,

         my beautiful one, come with me.

      11 See! The winter is past;

         the rains are over and gone.

      12 Flowers appear on the earth;

         the season of singing has come,

         the cooing of doves

         is heard in our land.

      13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;

         the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.

         Arise, come, my darling;

         my beautiful one, come with me.”

The Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) has been a curiosity to Biblical readers for millennia.  There is no direct mention of God (save 8.6), and its unabashed sexuality and forward female voice was elided by the ancient ascetics and later churchmen.  In order to downplay the physicality and bring forward theology, premodern commentators have primarily read the Song as allegory.  That is, the Song of Songs is read as a love poem between Israel’s God and his people, or later, Christ’s love for his church.  

Allegory interprets the physical images of the poem as representing a non-empirical--non-tangible-- reality of the Soul or Heaven.  Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) applied allegory to his interpretation of the Song of Songs “as a certain machine” to elevate the soul to God, finding God where no mention of God exists. In 590, he noted his non-theological bias against human sexuality in the Song when he decreed that married couples who mixed pleasure with procreation “transgressed the law.”  Roland Murphy in The Anchor Bible Dictionary notes, 

[The] traditional interpretation of the Song in the Christian community was motivated by certain ascetic and spiritual views that prevented a proper understanding of the literal historical sense. Yet the Song became one of the most popular books in the Middle Ages, when it was accorded more “commentaries” than any other OT book. In the 12th century alone, there were some thirty commentaries written on the [Song]. Outstanding among these is the work of Bernard of Clairvaux:  Eighty-six sermons delivered over a period of eighteen years, 1135–1153…Bernard had the knack of recognizing the experience of love which is in the Song. He called it “the book of experience” (Sermon 3, 1), and for him the greatest experience is love: “Love is alone sufficient by itself; it pleases by itself, and for its own sake. It is itself a merit, and itself its own recompense. It seeks neither cause, nor consequences, beyond itself. It is its own fruit, its own object and usefulness. I love, because I love; I love, that I may love” (Sermon 83, 4).

As contrasted with an allegorical reading, modern interpreters have tended to recover the Song’s historical sense.  It is read now as a literal poem of sexual expression and longing.  My friend Annette Schellenberg at San Francisco Theological Seminary has proposed that the Song of Songs was a performed drama at ancient Jewish festivals.  Modern commentators differ as to the structure of the poems making up the Song of Songs: who is speaking when and to whom.

However, this literal historical and dramatic approach helps us recover the dialogue of a man and woman with mutual physical desire.  In this recovered historical reading, we may note the Garden metaphors and images, so that God, even if unnamed, might be approving of this mutuality and physical desire for egalitarian closeness that harkens back to the creation of Eden and the male and female Adam and Eve.  Unlike in the rest of the Old Testament where sexuality is linked with the need for posterity and procreation, in both the pre-fall Eden and in the Song of Songs, physical closeness and mutuality between the sexes is idealized.

 The woman’s love is not something to be taken nor even earned—it is given freely, mutually.  It is a message for our current age of taking advantage or commercializing love for sex.

The Song of Songs may indeed be the drama of physical flourishing and mutuality of an idealized community—a lush primeval Garden outfitted by the Creator for the freely chosen enjoyment of its denizens.  If Prof. Schellenberg is correct that this drama was acted out in festivals, it might be seen as a reenactment of this innocent and childlike delight in the Creation where sex is unencumbered by violence, manipulation and one-sidedness.  This innocent and childlike delight in the creation might very well honor the Creator, so we might arrive at a more historical than allegorical theology, a theology that appreciates sexuality as a gift rather than a temptation to sin.

What is the nature of the love relationship in the Song of Songs?  As Murphy noted, ascetic and flesh-denying practices of both Jews and Christians could not endorse the open expression of sexual metaphors, freely given, such as the Song involves.  And yet as Bernard so compellingly noted, God is love and thus clearly community endorsed love is to be discerned in this text canonized by religious communities even as sex- and flesh-denying as the Dead Sea Scrolls fellowship at Qumran.  If the historical is to be preferred to the allegorical (as I think it must), how do we find God in the normative expression of physical love found in the Song of Songs?

Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096–1141), who was an older contemporary of Bernard of Clairvaux, asks that very question in his treatise, “Of the Nature of Love.”  He claims, “There are, then, two streams that issue from the fount of love, cupidity and charity… [L]ove [is]  a single movement of the heart, is of its nature one and single, yet is divided in its act. When it moves inordinately that is, whither it should not it is called cupidity; but, when it is rightly ordered, it is termed charity.” Hugh is making a claim that there is a rightly ordered love act and a wrongly ordered love act.  He is reading the Latin Bible’s uses of the words caritas [Greek: agapē ] and eros.  He is distinguishing the two.

Classical scholars I’ve spoken with tend to deny a distinction between agapē and eros, and I believe that in the pagan literature there might be little distinction.  Socrates in Plato’s Symposium has it that erotic love aids the soul’s ascent toward immortality, and it might be argued by them that Christian love does the same.  Yet the Platonic eros fulfills the self’s desire.

In the moral literature of the Old and New Testaments, the writers are wholly concerned with the practicalities of love of neighbor regardless of the self's desire.  When Christian writers speak of eros I believe they are calling us to acknowledge the excellence or baseness of our love of things and qualities, especially whether it is focused on the self or on others.  Hugh has it that love directed where it should not is cupidity/eros.  Love that is other directed, that does unto others what we would have them do for us, is charity/ agapē.  

Jesus in the Gospel John 13.34 commands his followers: ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, Love Others.  There is not a sense of desire for qualities or things outside of mere otherness, and this is rather a servant-love.  Charity.

Returning to the Song of Songs, I believe that erotic desire is clearly in view.  But that erotic desire is not a modern eroticism.  There are three aspects to the erotic love of the Song of Songs.  First, it is mutual.  Second, it is other-directed.  Relatedly, it is not narcissistic, which is self-directed and concerned with fulfilling the self's objectives.  Thus I believe the Song's desire is distinct from Platonic eros.  The Song’s desire is a way station in the development of an ethic of agapē.  The love in the Song of Song’s is not what Hugh would call cupidity, a desire for what should not be desired, but rather the desire is for the primeval God-given qualities of the desired lover.  The metaphors of creation and of peaceful and harmonious communal life in the Garden thus locate the desire in God’s peace and wholeness.  Reading the Song of Songs has us meditate on the lovers’ desire for noble qualities in the other, and not on some base qualities or characteristics.

Note, too, there is no sense of that modern affliction, narcissism, in view of the Song of Songs.  At one point, the lover notes  the object of her affection likewise desires her.  But she shows no inordinate thrill at this prospect, other than idealizing the mutuality of desire, clearly a divine norm for love.

So much of modern erotic desire fulfills the narcissist’s craving.  Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism notes that the decline of the 19th C family was associated with disintegration of personality and the desire for constant admiration and commercial demand. The movie Jerry Maguire had the line, “you complete me.”  The erotic desire is on personal fulfillment, akin to the pagan and Platonic ideal of eros. “You complete me” is not in view in the Song of Songs. Seeing myself in the lover's eyes is not in view of the Song of Songs. Concerned with commerce and market relationships of supply and demand, the modern narcissist commercializes sex and derives self-worth from the superordinate wage which supposedly measures social esteem and market demand. The social Darwinist as Don Juan does likewise, deriving self-esteem from money and from a bevy of lovers admiring his sexual "fitness." 

The Song of Songs does not have such commercial or market aspects to sexuality.  The woman is not given in marriage by her parents, but freely chooses her beloved. We indeed encounter an ancient’s understanding of what erotic love is inside a Garden of beauty and sufficiency (which is not to say glut or hoard).  And in that ideal Garden space, love is other directed and mutual.  This is a world in which marriage's highest values are loyalty and care taking, not personal fulfillment or the self's happiness.  Such a love mirrors the divine love, the ideal desire for what is beautiful, elegant, and good. Until we reach that state, Jesus gives us a servant’s task:  ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, Love Others. Don’t desire your self's physical beauty or attempt to find fulfillment in the other’s desire for you or your work product, but serve others as the Kingdom of God is being made anew in your virtues.

The Love desire in view in the Song of Songs thus might be seen as the highest form of human love, a correction to the pagan sexual desire. It is the love shown by the woman who poured pure nard on Jesus’ feet, unconcerned with its scarcity, unconcerned with its interpretation by onlookers.  It is a lavish and sensual act readied by virtuous servant-love. It brings harmony and solidarity to the family, neighborhood, and nation.
 The Bible has a deep ethic to make love and not war. 

 The Bible is telling us in the Song that when lovers are happy, the community flourishes in the guidance of its God. 

Don’t look for someone to complete you, look instead for someone you can love completely. This is the kind of love in view in the Song of Songs and for the adored in Psalm 45. May we all be privileged to glimpse this festive, selfless love from our lover.  And may we all have the grace to convey it to our lover as well.  AMEN.

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.

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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.