From Shalom-Centered Polyarchy to Hegemonies of Coercive Autarchies and Back Again: Virtuous Communities of Governing Grace as Political Theory and History For God's People

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds [5]

1 November 2024

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

An examination of governance, holiness, and relational wholeness as presented in both the Old and New Testaments.

 

Those who expect to reap the blessings of providence must most seriously consider the compunction of aligning with it, seeding and watering it, and being responsible to it in all things and for all people. This is the foundation of grace's deontological virtue of accountability to justice.

 

The Historical and Prophetic Books of the Old Testament narrate the implications of God’s chosen people to evade the choice and instead establish a kingdom based on their concepts of political power derived from outsider peoples—hegemons--they are meant and sent to witness to. As they do this, they leave aside the Torah model of governance, the representative qahal. That structure demonstrates that Israel’s original governance was intended to be participatory and established in moral and theological principles derived from the Shema’s (Deut. 6:4-9) metaphysical structure of human essence, reflecting the pattern of a just and equitable society.

In addition, these narratives detail how God tests the chosen people's resolve and commitment to that witness—first in the tabernacle, then in relation to their call for a monarch, and then associated with two temple establishments, the second designed by the hegemon. These people generationally turn to sacrifice their God-situated neighbors who had hitherto been collected into this holy expression of the expansionary and covenanted Logos and not a territorial hegemony. These excluded and marginalized are sacrificed and made expendable in the overweening pride and projects of hegemonic elites. Rather than gathering to deliberate how to expand the essence of inspirited humanity of all peoples, they fail even to include their own language group deposited with gift of holy expression. Absent any deliberated justification they fail to understand its Logos, they fail the most immediate test of aligning with the metaphysics of grace.

The New Testament reveals how God’s kingdom is established based on the universal Logos’ revelation of the heart’s necessary intentionality to sustain and repair estrangements actualized by forgiveness, love and golden rule deontological virtues. These serve and include others in providential resources destined for all (Matt. 5:45) without expectation of reciprocity or justifications from considerations of human acquisitive merit (e.g. wealth, purity, success at “soul winning”). Yet still political power exerts its transactional lure—its satanic temptation--to substitute this vision of the messianic NT mission by claiming determinism and the recurrence of historical forms. Anticipating these, religion resonates with and thrills to OT power dynamics where just the same old policies of hegemons are adapted BUT with pointing ritualistically to its God that brings a putative understanding of its prospects for national success.[2] It allies with partisans to promulgate moral policies of transactionalism, proposing an errant metaphysics of self-interest that sacrifices those “unworthy” to that interest for the sake of some favored order or form rather than unmitigated and crafting caring for the whole. These partisan factions and their policies dispense with and ignore the prophets' awareness of the Kingdom’s operating feature: it’s mirroring of transgressive injustices by unredeemed human nature. Instead, they ever point fingers outward in accusation at those they deem, by their continuing sin, have removed God’s blessings from their nostalgic and favored social intents. Yet in Ezekiel’s new temple established by Christ, the testing and mirroring goes forward as generations come and go, and yet Christ is becoming all-in-all. The right side of that history in the new temple is teleological—repairing, sustaining and caring.[3]

The prophetic pursuit of Old Testament holiness was intended to guide ancient Israel’s withdrawal from participating and aligning with the prevailing principles of coercive and violent domination in surrounding pagan cultures. Yet rather than turning away from the idolatrous—soul deadening—patterns of neighboring monarchies (esp. the baleful patterns of Egyptian pharaohs), by the time of the prophet Samuel it instead pursued mimetic demand for an autarch as if Saul could, with God’s intervention, beat the enemy at its own coercive and violent program. 

Such followed by the precepts in the Law of the King (Deut 17:14–20 critically dated to the Josianic Reforms) that radically and unexpectedly—in its ANE context—limited the monarch’s autonomy and prerogative. These limitations fit the more general and derivative theme in the Hebrew Bible of Israel’s adaptation to vassalage (subordination of sovereignty to another monarchic power because of its sinful aspirations to formalism, hierarchy, domination, and sacrificial dispensation of the unfavored). Laying out its demerits, the prophet and judge Samuel decried the people’s demand for a king (1 Sam 8:4–20)[6]. Earlier, contextualized by Abimelech’s leading question to the people in Judg 9:2, Jotham’s tragic parable of the bramble king in Judges 9 clarifies that autocracy has less warrant for the Israelites than polyarchy.

The qahal (קָהָל) was Israel’s cultic—God-ordained and therefore morally (and theologically [Neh. 13:1]) concerned—collected assembly “of the people” (Jer 26:17; Ps 107:32; 89:6; Judg 20:2 etc.). Neither autocracy nor idealized democracy, polyarchy is any form of government in which ruling authority is invested in multiple representative agents. It is most optimal when operating under the principle of subsidiarity, with local councils instituted to keep deliberating power close to the people over whom they have purview, promoting accountability and access.  In its demotic kinesthetics hoping for a better, God-securitized and collectivized existence, representative democracy is far better at retaining wisdom inside generational transition than an autarchic strong man promoting agendas of wealth—i.e. fascism--at deliberating, modeling, and instituting new middles of consensus toward the realization of community shalom[4].

    Such wholeness participates in and is an expression of eternity and infinity so that diversity, openness, and pluralism must be primary and desired features in God’s Kingdom—where grace is spread and shared. So that representative democracy is the ideal, Holy Spirit-enabled arena for worthy governance. It reflects the Bible’s critique of monarchy, particularly in the tradition of the critique of kingship in Deuteronomic History (Ps 146:3). 

    Wholeness, holiness, and deliberative virtue are shaped in the spaciousness in time and space and consciousness of wonder that only activates tolerance. Wholeness is relational in its fullest human sense and empathetic representations. Hospitality of diversity celebrates the distinctives and particularities of God’s human creation, including of plebiscites. Racial identification and exclusion can never be wholly relational in this eternal sense of shalom.

    Policy enacted by professionals whose governing positions are situated and backed by moneyed interests ever results in disembodied representation—detached from the human virtues that foster obligation and adherence to the Golden Imperative. And detached from the experience of real human needs of a nation defined as those who share its ideals. Such policy-making instead  consistently chases after the objectives of its masters. It routinely fails to provide solutions to the root moral problems sweeping American society. 

    Inside anxiety’s lack of wholeness--its insecurity that demands a gun and a strong man protector--with its unresolved questions and social discontents lies the foundations of authoritarianism that promises to restore a favored order without the necessity of prior establishment of interior peace and the exterior-modeled virtues, especially of accountability to justice. However, by instilling the virtues from the initial ground of patience and courtesy that is tolerance, order by means of Golden Imperative outreach and invitation may result providentially and organically in shalom that dispels neurosis. Through mirrored virtue, we can assuage our neurotic neighbors, helping them live in an increasingly crowded and challenging society. Democracies, by assembling the gamut of citizen stakeholders, more so when building from virtue at the grassroots. And the just order which follows, for:

Those who expect to reap the blessings of providence must most seriously consider the compunction of aligning with it, seeding and watering it, and being responsible to it in all things and for all people. This is the foundation of grace's deontological virtues--and most immediately and gravely of the virtue of accountability to justice.

There is NO excuse: no frustrated partisan may take up the cause of violence or lies to advance his program.

 

NOTES:

[2] A pastor who carried a concealed gun under his robes on Sunday (and ever else) argued with me that having a gun AND God increased his security and success. He revealed himself a slave to anxiety (see below).

OT passages that emphasize the dangers and consequences of Israel’s desire for a king:

 1 Samuel 8:4-7: "Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, 'You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.' But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, 'Give us a king to govern us.' Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, 'Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.'

 1 Samuel 8:10-18: "So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, 'These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots... He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers... He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers...'"

 Judges 9:7-15: "When it was told to Jotham, he went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim and cried aloud and said to them, 'Listen to me, you lords of Shechem, so that God may listen to you. The trees once went out to anoint a king over themselves. So they said to the olive tree, "Reign over us."... But the bramble said to the trees, "If in good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon."'

[3] The Prophet Ezekiel envisions the return of God’s accompanying presence (Parousia) not in a structure mediated by priests and rituals and furnishing but by the indwelling Spirit wherein a renewed holiness brings the virtues and message that ramifies hopefulness in all new generations for the realized eternities of unmitigated grace:

Ezekiel 40:1-4: "In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was struck down, on that very day, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me there. He brought me, in visions of God, to the land of Israel, and set me down on a very high mountain, on which was a structure like a city to the south."

Ezekiel 43:1-5: "Then he brought me to the gate, the gate facing east. And there, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east; the sound was like the sound of mighty waters, and the earth shone with his glory... As the glory of the Lord entered the temple by the gate facing east, the spirit lifted me up and brought me into the inner court; and the glory of the Lord filled the temple."

Ezekiel 47:1-12: "Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east... And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes."

 [4] Passages that specify how the qahal was central to Israel’s communal worship and governance, reflecting a collective and inclusive pattern of governance rather than a hierarchical, autocratic structure:

Deuteronomy 9:10: "And the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone written with the finger of God; on them were all the words that the Lord had spoken to you at the mountain out of the fire on the day of the assembly."

Deuteronomy 31:30: "Then Moses recited the words of this song, to the very end, in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel."

Judges 20:2: "The chiefs of all the people, of all the tribes of Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God, four hundred thousand foot soldiers bearing arms."

1 Kings 8:14: "Then the king turned around and blessed all the assembly of Israel, while all the assembly of Israel stood."

Jeremiah 26:17: "And some of the elders of the land arose and said to all the assembled people,"

Psalm 107:32: "Let them extol him in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders."

[5] This essay is adapted from Chapter 5,“Soothing Modernity’s Combative Anxiety: Recognizing Spirit and Enabling Neighbor in Culture and Politics” of my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtues as the Craft of Theology Beyond Strategic Biblicism.

[6]When God’s chosen holy people for witness beg God for a king like the other nations have, to which they are to witness, God  informs that such a king—by virtue of the position--will exploit and dominate them. They don’t understand what holy witness and choice entails. They want a king to preserve them like the other nations (1 Samuel 8) when they had the God of the universe accompanying them, intimately.

---

 Precis for a Metaphysics of Flow

Rev. Douglas Olds

October 31, 2024

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

Research into so-called "flow states" seeks a key to its golden gate to increase intellectual, commercial, and athletic performance witnessed by those who tell of "experiences where:

• Time dissolves

• Your self-consciousness melts away

• You're completely absorbed in what you're doing — performing at your absolute best" 

(https://x.com/DrJohnVervaeke/status/1851959043884995068)

Positive psychologist Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi led the way to describe Flow as “a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi emph added). In this description, the existential human and its peak states are ever grounded in noesis--epistemology and hedonic productivity measured in formal terms resulting from cause and effect and therefore putatively subject to strategic evaluation.

However, as I've explicated elsewhere, the human essence is the telic transformation of human nature where cogitation serves egological needs. This transformation is begun in the ear (by hearing wisdom), moves to the heart--meaning intentionality--then the expressive and kinesthetic soul, then to effort that actualizes the transformed intentionality. This is the metaphysical sequence of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Only when this metaphysics is initiated to become integrated into the human person does Jesus add "dianoia" (problem-solving insight) in Matthew 22:37 to the completing wholeness of human essence.

From this metaphysics it follows that flow isn’t just a psychological state of inner exhilaration or time displacement of ego but includes these toward an ethical mode of mindfulness of others that is harmonious, grace-aligning, and generous (see the discussion of grace's flow by aligning virtues that pacify in Olds 2023). The ethical center of flow is inherently social and flourishing in intent, thus spiritually aligned with proxies of divine accompaniment. In my experience, FLOW has a pronounced ethical center in good will (conation [ibid.]) that neutralizes anxieties that gum up our performance. It is in ethical closeness with divine accompaniment (ousia) that promotes deontological, Golden Rule virtues centered on relational wholeness, healing, and cosmic repair rather than retributive or grudge holding or threat scoping that divert us from ego. This ousia--this seeking of union with Christ the Shema's perfection--encounters every aspect of creation as FLOW of good will, an aligned flowing from and with grace and human attendance to divine companionship that imposes no transactional tension onto the divine, nor expectation of reciprocity as reward, nor seeing others as intrinsically flawed with a limited horizon. Flow maximizes returns to the neighbor-- the other--absent egological stratagems and expectations, allow the cosmic metaphysical structure to redeem the moment for eternity.

Flow thus is an experience and manifestation of a person who is moving from nature (and its acquisitiveness) to the human essence that bridges divine grace with the generationally-renewing earth essence. Flow is thus developmental and not an isolated state. Flow is Trinitarian, both metaphysically revealing and metaphysically operating to spread providential blessings that liberate and vivify and bless where deprivation and hegemony are found to deaden FLOW. Flow displaces the biological appetites for personal security, comfort, and recognition to the Trinitarian plane of attending grace, accountability to God and neighbor, and the integration of all virtues into ramifying wholeness that unifies, creatively.

 (Thimble Sermon:) 

Recentering in the Heart’s Virtue: 

A Call for De-gendering Careerism in the Spiritual Vocation of Listening, Intentionality, and Love

Rev. Douglas Olds

27 October 2024

“Women are naturally more empathetic than men. They identify and feel the particular hardships of others in a way that men don't.”  So by all means, the capitalist theories consider this commonplace to suggest: to improve the world (expand the relative supply of labor chasing a fixed political economic structure), let’s shape girls into male character by training them how to sharp elbow their climb on corporate ladders. Such shaping of girls is illustrated by the lists of personal characteristics and adjectives to avoid vs. to advertise (via professional recommendation letters) for career advancement purposes proposed by the Commission on the Status on Women of the University of Arizona (https://rb.gy/5pyfgd):

Characteristics of women to “Avoid: caring, compassionate, hard-working, conscientious, dependable, diligent, dedicated, tactful, interpersonal, warm, helpful.”

Ego characteristics to “Include: successful, excellent, accomplished, outstanding, skilled, knowledgeable, insightful, resourceful, confident, ambitious, independent, intellectual.”

The first list of adjectives (labeled “avoid”) ironically demonstrates relational focus which initiates eternal centering (the listening initiated, heart-centeredness of the Deuteronomic Shema [Deut. 6:4-9])—while the second list ironically demonstrates centrifugality, the seeking of hierarchy and the monuments of ego, and the tether to the cash nexus as opposed to householding-scale commerce and provisioning. These lists reflect a traditional gender dichotomy, where females are urged take on the egotistic autonomy of traditional males in order to advance in their careers. Such “industry identified objectives” stifle the soul and commodify citizens as purposive agents of mammon, the insatiable demon of wealth-seeking (Matt. 6 :24).

 Instead, to address escalating social dysfunction, it is the male who should avoid the latter list and develop the former list of character. Jesus adds the purposive intellect (dianoia: Matt. 22:37) to the Shema only after the soul of a person has been reordered, directed from noetic primacy and set right (been rebirthed) in the Shema’s sequence of human essence: by ear to attended Torah, then heart to love, nephesh (the expressive and kinesthetic soul sited in the throat--to express words of goodness mixed with and conveyed by spirit), then effective action (exemplified by Proverb’s virtues), again rerouted in the Shema's sequence by the heart.

It is worth quoting the Shema here to note its sequential metaphysics:

4 Hear [HEED], O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. 

The New Testament adds dianoia to this sequence to carry through the experiential insights of metanoia (the effects of repentance) to actuate Jeremiah’s new covenant of the heart of flesh—the heart devoted to liberating and enlivening flesh. See https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/06/ Again, this suggests that the task for men requires the greater emphasis and address: to displace the mind’s arrogating primacy regarding social purpose and talent, subordinating it to charitable and Golden Rule functioning where gift and the other--like of God's providence--is more valorized than talent and accumulation. Churches and pastors fail this “born again” redemption of human nature becoming human essence when they model and call for machismo, alpha dog energy as dominance, and contempt of non-hegemonic human expressions of craft, instead to exemplify bitterness, sneering, an identity of derision, and nostalgiac regret looking for God in denial of the telic present, instead in a fierce past’s ancestry to "come again."

By calling males to give up their comfortably limned roles for a better, more creative and creational calling, and dissuading females from making the traditional male’s same mistakes, Jesus as ever redefines common, cultural ideas of human merit. It is not to climb mountains from a bootstrapped condition to reseed and restaff hierarchies with self and friends, but to ever pursue the virtues of the Golden Imperative that soothe every moment as God-given, a ceaseless and suasive alignment with grace that is without fail becoming all in all, even if every generation needs to be recalled—by the ear of the Torah and prophets (Matt 22: 40)—to the metaphysics of intentionality that enflourishes, sustains, liberates, and repairs estrangements of intent that have fallen from the good creation’s intent.

It may be argued there exists an optimal balance between ambition and relational virtue that aligns with the human metaphysical essence in the Shema.  That virtues of a middle course are instrumental and not deontological. But take close note of the the Book of Proverbs which is thematically centered on the dangers of seeking a middle way for egological instrumentalities. For example, Proverbs 13:11a (NRSV) coheres with the semantic range of hăbēl: unworthy, selfish means and vain, vacuous ends that evaporate like mist: “Wealth fraudulently [NIV: hastily] acquired dissolves.” 

But the middle path may only be relational and not egotistical. Its optimum prioritizes the other, the neighbor, the one who images God but is owed the consideration of the Golden Rule, the foundation of deontological ethics.

Shalom (peaceable wholeness that reaches out to include) and agon (strife and exclusionary striving) are the two dichotomous paths that admit no syncretism.[1] We are never to waver (John 6:66) from the one true path—never “to the right or to left” (Deut 5:32; 17:11; 28:14; Josh 1:7; 23:6; Prov 4:27; 2 Kgs 22:2; Cf. Prov 4:25; 10:9, 17; 12:28). No third way exists between life and death.

---

[1] Syncretism is the [attempted] “amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought . . . [in order, per its etymology, agonistically] to unite against a third party.”

—Soanes and Stevenson, Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

 To be born again in and by the heart of Jesus is to listen for the intent behind words in every communal space--listening for the ethics of Golden Rule repair focused first on the other, or for strategic speech proposing to sickle the future of opportunity. Being born again in the Shema as the path to Jesus Christ includes a vocation of ear, heart, and repairing insight replacing discontenting cogitations and egological careerism--for man and woman alike!

 Can You Go Home, Again?

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

October 6, 2024

 

Audio Sermon linked here

"What’s really made a mess of the world? Grace? Forgiveness? Turning the other cheek? Or is it guilt, punishment, vengeance, and retribution?" --Robert F. Capon.

READINGS

.

Psalm 18:20-30

The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness;

    according to the cleanness of my hands he recompensed me.

    21For I have kept the ways of the LORD,

    and have not wickedly departed from my God.

    22For all his ordinances were before me,

    and his statutes I did not put away from me.

    23I was blameless before him,

    and I kept myself from guilt.

    24Therefore the LORD has recompensed me according to my righteousness,

    according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.

 

    25With the loyal you show yourself loyal;

    with the blameless you show yourself blameless;

    26with the pure you show yourself pure;

    and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.

    27For you deliver a humble people,

    but the haughty eyes you bring down.

    28It is you who light my lamp;

    the LORD, my God, lights up my darkness.

    29By you I can crush a troop,

    and by my God I can leap over a wall.

    30This God—his way is perfect;

    the promise of the LORD proves true;

    he is a shield for all who take refuge in him.

 

Luke 15: 11-32

11 Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. 13 A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” ’ 20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’22 But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

25 “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. 27 He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ 28 Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ 31 Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ”

 

 

Can You Go Home, Again? [Sermon Notes:]

Audio Sermon linked here

 

Psalm 18 notes the life journey of two sons realized in the parable: what the Psalm calls the loyal and blameless, who at the end reveals himself as self-righteously indignant at the father’s merciful welcome of the prodigal, and the prodigal, who has underwent the trials of exploration and misadventures.

The context of the prodigal story is the historical situation in Palestine at the time. People who considered themselves “true Israel” felt in exile by the illegitimate priesthood and temple establishment collaborating with the Roman occupiers.

messianic expectations were running high during the time of Herod the Awful through another two generations

In this time of political expectation and chaos, there were models of a virtuous king: Dt. 17. But also there were ideals of kingly virtue imparted from pagan neighbors who might be necessary to defeat these romans.

Homeric epic to render, mythically,

the metaphysics of behavioral mirroring in Psalm 18 that is behind what is being revealed existentially in the parable:

That “26with the pure you show yourself pure;

    and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.”

How then can our “identity” be based in a physical place?

 As I preached last time, any authenticity tied to that physical identity whereby we deign to speak for collectives frankensteined together and cobbled to create partisan rage as the path to ultimate and crowning victory upon victory?

 

All cultures were aware of a metaphysics of trial and homecoming, and the poet Homer wrote an epic of the cyclical mirroring of injustice begun with a war: the Iliad and Odyssey.

I think that the concluding epic character Odysseus gives us an entry, alongside Psalm 18, to understanding the parable:

the way to end exile and come home to the truth of God.

I. “complicated,” like a disease.

2. Just suffered a tough month with COVID: progressive and looping complications, twisted, much turned

3. Anthony Esolen

Virtue of nostalgia? An-algesiac

 

[Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1996). In A Greek-English Lexicon. Clarendon Press, loc. cit., excerpts]:

πολυτροπία, Ion. -ίη, ἡ, versatility [of] craft, Hdt.2.121.ε ́.

II. multifariousness, variety, Hp.Acut.3 (pl.), D.H.Amm.2.3, Corn.ND25, M.Ant.12.24.

 

✪ πολύτροπος, ον, (τρέπω) much-turned, i.e. much-travelled, much-wandering, epith. of Odysseus, Od.1.1, 10.330.

II.       turning many ways: metaph., shifty, versatile, wily, of Hermes, h.Merc.13, 439; τοῖς ἀσθενέσι καὶ π. θηρίοις and in this sense Plato took the word as applied to Odysseus,

III.      τὸ π. τῆς γνώμης their versatility of mind, Th.3.83; τὸ π., of Alcibiades, Plu.Alc.24.

  2. fickle, ὅμιλος Ps.-Phoc.95.

  3. of diseases, changeful, complicated,

 

Anything to get home.

Odysseus is who we celebrate for his wily, twisting, loopy craft as the excellence of this chaotic and turbulent age.

 

Except that he abandons his followers in his quest of coming home to his former hearth and wife and child. He is a Kinist who operates by wile to get himself.

 

Nostalgia means homesickness, and to me is the political disease of our rabid, partisan age,

grounded in a chaos-inducing manipulation of a certain view of

of Human nature and its home there in in biological agon as ontological and historically necessary:

Trying to conjure up the past anew by any means necessary only births monsters.

Refusing the future to push its prospects out of cradles is the jackdaw of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is NO virtue.

Nostalgia is a fixed, tended and watered memory of place and social order seems more solid and real than lived experience.

A denial of the neighbor in the present to restore those of the past brings false sense of transcendence which exists between memory, the present, and the future,

along with the transition between them.

An emotion of wistfulness comes from living with the disjunction between a past fondly remembered and a present filled with loss and guilty conscience.

In such a case, the memory can only be opposed to that transition and the repentance necessary to move into it.

Like Abraham, to Kum Lech!

To be born again in and through the heart with authentic, living neighbors.

We prodigals who recollect and experience the gap between high ideal and imperfect reality as painful precisely because its aspirations are set so much higher than what came before.

We are coming to be accountable to conscience and to the virtues that align with grace’s progress,

what we call the Kingdom of God with Christ becoming all in all.

This accountability is the foundation of the virtue of recollection.

By contrast, beneath the false virtue of nostalgia is an insistence that we can only be content by reconciling ourselves to far lower ethical ideals—to an ontological human nature of agon kept at bay by guardians on our chosen team.

Alain de Benoist, a political right thinker aware of fascism’s allure, described state of nature reactionaries as clothed in visceral atavisms of "bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—showing [fascism’s] ideal [of a home] is always foregone, always spent,” always trite but menacing.

Such characterized that change in political vocabulary after 9/11 when the “homeland” was under attack. America neighborhood morally pulled back into “homeland,”

a word that made many us queasily recollect the Nazi’s use of “heimat.” Homewardness. Homeward bound, like a return that Abraham was not allowed.

 The subsequent politicization of homeland into an ideology,

And those flag lapel pins started popping up everywhere,

changing the meaning of the flag from the expansion of ideals to a retreat into an ancestral “home.”

And while beginning the 1930s rich business men strategize to marry capitalism to Christianity, now these lapel pins are married to celebrities wearing crosses:  

the meaning of patriotism moved from the high ideals of our political language as ever outreaching national spirit

 to a kin tie to a homeland..

 

To this state-led intention to build security on human-kin nature, state power says this:

 

 if something is complex, simplify it, which is the propagandistic power of simple, homey past; stories that people tell — or avoid telling — to reshape and distort the past.

The causes of imperialistic American war and slavery is complex, they say.

The representatives of these nostalgiac powers step in to train by military-industrial indoctrination of youth that

framed choices as intrinsically complicated and hard--maturation involved nuance, tradeoffs& the weighing of "lesser evils" to bring in the better world framed by the manipulations of nostalgia.

That "realist" logic, of course, is nonsensical...Either there is an unalloyed option for the good, or the system is driving by the flaws and driven by the flawed toward instituting flaws.

Frankensteining Odysseus for the State, the state’s idea of human nature as at home in nature, not spirit.

To walk away is the righteous path sure to be calumnied as "cowardice"or betrayal.

As I said, nostalgia offers the promise of a simpler life when we weren’t yet immobilized by anxieties of conscience from the misuse of our gifts and liberties.

 It’s a place where form leads function. You’ve heard “form follows function?” That’s recollection.

Recollection has a function, to repair nostalgia’s form from memory rather than its repaired and repairing function.

I know this is abstract, so let me quote TS Eliot’s nostalgia:

“What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place…” T.S. Eliot

This focus on forms as blood-tied traditions is actually etiquette as religion-- that by our recognition of manners we recognize our kin and their inner lives.

 This is coffee-hour church of the past, bound to the way things have always been done and are expected to continue.

 The seeking for the timeless, the unchanging, participating in God’s being as immutable, as if we finite creature can possibly understand this infinite being in time—even understanding time by couterposing in with history.

Calling out some idea of timeless or traditional manners—back when our parents were lions in this community-- is not  now what I mean boldness for the gospel’s sake:

 

I know the word “gospel” offends many, so let’s unpack it.

Because the prodigal sons and daughters are your neighbors and they are afraid of the father and of the older brother. We are the older brothers: we see ourselves the custodians of the father’s love and the traditions of belief and the language.

So boldness for gospel’s repairing the peaceful community includes hospitality—yes welcome at the door and coffee—

but speaking a language that makes sense to our neighbors in time and space, what we call context.

The context of the prodigal children church is an earned mistrust of the self-righteousness of churchy language and the bastardization of grace that refuses to speak of the Golden Rule in virtue instead to speak the partisan language of rage and guns and demonized manners and identities based on physical origin and victimization.

 

This is what makes our prodigal neighbors uneasy to walk in this door. What kind of manipulative partisan rage and preachy old fashioned judgmental language will they find,

what kind of abstruse and obscure theologoical language and mannerist rituals will make them feel they come up short?

Yet boldness with the gospel proclaims the message of God’s forgiving and merciful grace is the primary and necessary step of the repair the human cosmos.

Are any of allowed to silence ourselves because we afraid of being misunderstood as being on of “those kind” of Christians?

Are we not instead responsible to try—to be bold, to deliberate the best way to invite people in to hear the “gospel,” which is THE message of hope and certainty that speaks truth about the ineffective and futile prospects of “those kind” of holy postures, those kind we found more in the past?

Our prodigal neighbors are watching power in church and society say that if something is simple, complicate it, taking it out of the hands of citizens and endowing its solution with “complicated political theologians and financiers” who understand the past and rule machines and codes to gin us back there.

We can, they say, Disney-fy the past, make it even better. There’s no place like home. Ever home!

Where the steeple towered over the town square signifying a sense of order and cosmic connection for human beings.

A Disney church nostalgia matter-of-factly hierarchical served by priesthoods to painted and beautified stone, with a settled social order signified by animal before man, man before God, woman before man, serf before lord, and worker before owner.

Little Gidding

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

TS Elliot connects the decay of his traditions to a more significant history of England while projecting (diming) hopes for the future because he sees less and less of these patterns recurring. But may be  we can resurrect them by resurrecting the

Elliot’s is a fantastic but wistful nationalist nostalgia of whatever we Englanders were doing was right.

What our spirit had handled—

"that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.”

The idea that the USA has a divine mission. That our energy and depth and spirit would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. [Once AngloAmericanism] had all the momentum; they had ridden the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” –Hunter s. Thompson.

Yet  This wave breaks for all nationalisms every generation.

 No nostalgia can unlock a tide or generational force contrary to the coming of Christ all in all.

Is this Christian—a people riding the wave of nostalgia back into a past to begin eternity again in a static being—in a static cradle??

Abraham was called from this cradle of civilization in the fertile crescent of what later became Babylon.

He was given a promise in a spiritual place, and as he journeyed across a continent, he was ever tempted to settle down under a rock he constructed celebrating his relationship with the One God, his father. But that Father repeatedly told him, Qum, Lech.

We are Abraham’s children too.

We are becoming. We are not frozen inside a home space. The Prodigal Son church does not journey backward into Babylon or called into Egypt’s pyramids and pentagons of power.

We are children of eternity coming.

We are the Prodigal Son Church, a church that reaches out to the self-righteous and the ashamed alike, bringing them the truer way to understand how this world is broken and how to become repairers.

Our prodigals want to come home to what is real, and not what is false. And that requires repentance from traditions and institutions that create hierarchical orders by crafty language and the insistence on norms of manners and arguments over words./

 

The virtue of accountability leading to repentence create the conditions where we can break free of egoistic self-interestedness and form meaningful neighborhoods in the father’s love. There is no other path than Christ’s vitures grounded in the GR. And this follows from the parable of the prodigal son.

It is the virtue of recollection that replaces the false virtue of nostalgia

Recollection reflects on why coercive and enslaving power, in each specific instance, has its way designating some things as complex and some things as simple and restorative.

The Gospel of Grace is the ultimate solution. It creates a legacy of virtue and peace, countering the divisiveness of identity politics.

The sermon calls for the rejection of nostalgia, running away from the goads of conscience and refusing to repent instead

Recollection of the past—running memory through experience of repentance and grace,

is necessary to meet current challenges.

The solution lies in peacebuilding, reconciliation, and the restoration of narratives of meaning.

It’s not nostalgia. Let us repent from nostalgia and its ghosts of distorted memories

Trying to live again by inhibiting the future’s energies of betterment from arriving: the kingdom of God.

  

How do we escape from nostalgia?

By adopting the virtue of Recollection to stimulate repentance AND accoountabilty by asking "What’s really made a mess of the world? Grace? Forgiveness? Turning the other cheek? Or is it guilt, punishment, vengeance, and retribution?" (Robert F. Capon).

Recollection asks, where is our real home, where memory has not been shaped by ignorance, propaganda, cooptation, and self-deceit?

 We recollect that God is the father of all wandering prodigals. He forgives. He is merciful. He welcomes us to our true home, after our odysseys, our experimentations of getting ahead by our natural wits and like Ps. 18, being led into the pit by our wiles.

 Like Moses, prodigals were born nesting in nested pyramids of power, and like Moses we are born again in the ear, by hearing the proclamation that Jesus is our Lord by virtue of his grace of forgiveness extended to us on the Cross. He reveals the essence of God the father in mercy—in grace alone.

 Can the complicated one go home again? Not the way Odysseus does—back to the wolf-fold home.

 But more like the journeys of Abraham where

Home is where language means something, has a stable meaning grounded peacemaking not in complications to bring in something else. Coming home not to maintained and static insitution but a site of promise through activity of REPAIR by peace not wiles and violence.

The journey of repentance brings the prodigal home. There is none of that in sight of the blind Homer.

If we think through out these sources of unrepented stability, has our home endured only in a frozen nostalgia of human nature—

a human ego caught between self-aggrandizing urges and conscience?

This is where nature never changes: always ready to kill and coerce.

 By contrast

Peacemaking is the real excellence of polytropos. It is ousia (essence) the human essence of which shares with the divine accompaniment and shared action, guided by grace, not by ego.

 

Peacemaking is prophetic, shaped by virtue and wisdom, and not by strategic power. It is kinesthetic as it learns the soul’s full range of empathy in order to begin to comply with the GR duty.

 

•        Peacemaking reads the full context of conflict and through experience and wisdom,

•        anticipates how to keep the peace through virtue and

•        bides and observes to offer positive solutions.

•        These require travels and experiences at least as varied and ranging as Odysseus’, with a far broader range of soul training through the arts and kinesthetic processing of beauty,

•        poignancy, awe, and the sublime

•        that has gentled our inner boxer,

•        our inner pugilist,

•        where we have learned to take off our inner boxing gloves

•        and have learned to tap our hearts to connect our heels with a partner,

•        not an identity of homelands

But true meaning-making is rooted in accountability, empathy, and ethical growth.

Kipling writes of prodigals:

the Stranger within my gate,

He may be true or kind,

But he does not talk my talk—

I cannot feel his mind.

I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,

But not the soul behind…

We need to risk for these. And if the risk of trying new words or explaining old doesn’t pay off, then how we in this congregation any worse off? Can we afford not to risk for the gospel to renew our place here? To bring in new life, new energies, new crafts that unify and build wholeness?

--

Attendance to Grace is the solution, whereby we recognize every moment is created by God to allow us to create a legacy that endures—eternally endures—by virtues flowing from the GR. Recollection, not nostalgia of retrieval, where the past is contextualized and adopted to meet current challenges of pacification, shalom-building, and repair of created unities of the loved children of God.

 

Recollection is the virtue We dance with memory to tame our inner boxer of nostalgia,

To tame our inner dog guarding fences of our idealized pasts,

 our inner calculations of

situational tactics of polytropos

 

 and bring all into the repairing ethical structure of the sheepfold home, speaking its language and commitment to peac. May it be so for you and me: AMEN