A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds
First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo (CA)
30 June 2013
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Rationality vs. "Rapture"
Rationality vs. "Rapture"
[link:] 'Rapture Politics' Harnesses Rightwing to Doomsday Horsemen
Douglas Olds, April 18, 2013
[link:] 'Rapture Politics' Harnesses Rightwing to Doomsday Horsemen
Christians who desire peace and wholeness need to name the
doctrine of "rapture" (where the parousia of Christ precedes the end time tribulation for the non-faithful) for what it seems to me: a misinterpretation of scripture
that has been co-opted by dualist reporting. As the media and the establishment ridicule followers of Jesus' message of love of neighbor, they simultaneously enlist Christians into support for nuclear hawks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
"Rapture" is a speculative doctrine of certain "dispensationalists" novelists that Christians will in the final battle be "caught up" in the clouds to meet Jesus, a moment that escapes the tribulation of the End Times and its violence and temptations. "Rapture" is both escapist and utopian: it allows Christians to escape responsibility for being peacemakers and for protecting life on earth because they bear no consequence for how and when the world takes a turn toward catastrophe. It's as if the so-called righteous act out their irresponsibility for "the total depravity of everybody else."
"Rapture" is a speculative doctrine of certain "dispensationalists" novelists that Christians will in the final battle be "caught up" in the clouds to meet Jesus, a moment that escapes the tribulation of the End Times and its violence and temptations. "Rapture" is both escapist and utopian: it allows Christians to escape responsibility for being peacemakers and for protecting life on earth because they bear no consequence for how and when the world takes a turn toward catastrophe. It's as if the so-called righteous act out their irresponsibility for "the total depravity of everybody else."
Yet even (especially) Christians have
the responsibility to be intelligent, to love God with all our mind[i],
to test the "doctrines"of leaders (1 Jn 4) for their fruit of
peacefulness, patience, compassion, and gentleness (Gal 5.22-3; Col 3.12-3). A doctrine that tempts Armageddon does not fulfill this test.
We Mainstream Christians who think should
demand that establishment reporters stop this calumny against
Christianity--that so called "rapturist politics" is either
mainstream or that the mainstream supports a message that hastens, bluffs, or tempts
death.
The media and the whole of
rational Christianity needs to reject this kind of magical thinking for the sake of
life and the planet.
"Rapture" is not a Biblical word nor is it a promise to
Christians that they will escape the tribulations of death or the end times. In
fact, Jesus in the Gospels (Lu 21; Mk 13; Mt 24) repeatedly makes plain that
Christians may suffer most. "Rapture" as a doctrine that
suggests that Christians are trying to bring on THE END is a scandal to those
whom we must evangelize with the message that Jesus has overcome death for all
of his followers. Not in this life, but in the resurrected life. In this
life, we are to work for PEACE and LIFE. 1 Thess 4 does not absolve us
from that work and that commitment.
As I wrote in an earlier blog post:
Jesus Christ, the Word of God, did not see himself as equal
with God and thus was objectively humble... Jesus denied knowledge of objective
truth in matters of "times and places" (Acts 1.7, Mt. 24.36), yet
that does not stop some of His Armageddon-anticipating followers from claiming
(or responding to) this as predictive knowledge. Are the repeated
frustrations of expected dates of Armageddon in fundamentalist circles enough
to demonstrate the limitations of "objective truth" claims in
religion? It is in my and many others' estimation. These
predictions are a scandal to outsiders to whom we must announce the message of
God's plan of overcoming death. Jesus warns us against these! Why is it
still going on? Why do we try to hasten the end by promoting forces
seeming to bring on Armageddon? That is not my meaning when I say, Come
Lord Jesus.
[i] Mk
12.30: ὅλης τῆς διανοίας
all discriminating reason. Jesus
adds loving God with all our dianoia to
the Shema of Deuteronomy 6.4, to love God with all your heart, soul, and
might. This is a condition of the New Testament Age: to be rational and discriminating in the Love of God, because there is the human temptation of the flesh to follow all kinds of leaders that promise to think for us, to be self-satisfied and irrational.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Where I Find Hope: the Fourth Day after Easter, 2013
Where I Find Hope: the Fourth Day after Easter, 2013
Douglas Olds
April 4, 2013
Well, that was quite a Lenten journey. How about for you? And thanks be to God that we are blessed with
life and living hope from our faith and the testimony of a cloud of witnesses (Heb
12.1-2) to the resurrection of the Son of Man: Jesus Christ who is revealed to
be the author and bearer of human salvation, the redeemer from the curse of death, the
Word and Son and Lamb of God. He is risen and living among us and with God, together sending the Holy Spirit from unseen light for guiding and sustaining our mission. Trinitarian
power, mysterious and wonderful. Amen and Amen, as my friend Douglass Fitch says.
Today’s Presbyterian Lectionary includes this First
Reading from Ezekiel 37:1-10 (14), so influential to the resurrection hopes
that our church looks to today:
[1]The hand of
the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of
the LORD and
set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.
[2]He led me
all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and
they were very
dry. [3]He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I
answered,
"O Lord GOD, you know." [4]Then he said to me, "Prophesy to
these
bones, and say
to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. [5]Thus says
the Lord GOD to
these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall
live. [6]I will
lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and
cover you with
skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall
know that I am
the LORD."
[7]So I
prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly
there was a
noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.
[8]I looked,
and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and
skin had
covered them; but there was no breath in them. [9]Then he said to me,
"Prophesy
to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says
the Lord GOD:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these
slain, that
they may live." [10]I prophesied as he commanded me, and the
breath came
into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast
multitude.
--[DAILYLECTION email list of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) for April 4, 2013].
Earlier this week, Monday in
fact, I spoke with a young woman from Petaluma, up the road from my home in
southern Marin County, California. Her
name, which I am withholding for her privacy, was an Ethiopian word for
sweetness, honey, and wine. She had a
cast on her left forearm and the fingers on that hand were askew and out of
alignment. A purple and deep scar ran down from her exposed elbow and
disappeared underneath the covering of her cast. After exchanging some details about my life
to her, she told me her story of her arm.
Four summers ago, while driving
on Mt. Tamalpais (a prominent landmark in our county), she had a severe car
accident. Her car flipped and rolled, settling off road where it was unpaved and wild.
Emergency teams rescued her and medically evacuated her to a hospital by
helicopter. She would undergo 26 operations on her arm from that day to the present.
More to come, in all likelihood. She
averaged an operation per month for the first year and half as the doctors
first worked to save her arm from amputation and then to reconstruct its
function. She never lost hope, and she
aimed to be out of the hospital before 100 days of inpatient treatment. She was released on her 99th day. Upon
release, she lost fear of losing the arm, yet to this day she is struggling with
chronic pain and has flashbacks to the accident that causes her anxiety.
She smiles brightly as she tells
this story, not sardonically or fatalistically. It is a smile that seems to me filled
with something beyond a simple faith. Her
story is alive and breathing in that smile. I asked her where her hope comes from. “From my
arm, it is healing. And I’ll tell you
something. For four months after the
accident, my arm was ejecting twigs and glass and cattails that had been
ground into my arm in the accident. A
two inch piece of glass came out after 4 months, and that seemed to finish all
the stuff I had in me.”
I had never heard of story like
this. I had heard of transplant
rejection, where the body rejects the organ of a (non-related) donor. But here is an account of the resilience and
tenacity of a human arm. My new friend told
me a story of an arm's overcoming inert and dead matter. She told me her story of a resilient and
tenacious spirit, as well. Resilient and tenacious life.
This story gives me hope. Life overcomes the inert. I wonder what those who place their hopes of enhancements
by implanting technology into the body might make of this story.
Again, here is the breath of life
and spirit of this hopeful young woman overcoming the dry twigs and the fired silica
sands of her own wilderness experience.
She is persevering. She says both the pain and the function of her
fingers are getting better, and in that she finds hope.
“And you know what else?” she
went on. “I had this dog, a small, shi..y dog, and I’m lying in the hospital and
I’m thinking I’m going to have to get rid of him when I get back home. He brought
me nothing and he didn’t behave. But
when I got home, it was if he was waiting for me. He was all attentive and turned into a great
dog, a companion. He’s at home waiting
for me now.”
My young woman friend tells me
this story on the day after Easter, April 1, 2013.
[Skip down to next line for more hope. The next section is on the challenges of destiny.]
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." This quote of Edmund Burke has been adopted into the tradition of eternal recurrence that "Christianity’s most perceptive critic"[i] F. Nietzsche proposed was the fate of the earth. Destiny. To me that suggests lack of freedom, lack of autonomy, and the ever-frustrated will to escape through domination. These signal lack of humanity. Destiny is that which leads inexorably to death’s final word, where only the self-assertions and self-promotions in this life matter in the eternal memory of the earth. Destiny lives on in the memory of the earth. Note the negating multiplier in Burke’s quotation as it goes forward from the present: ignorance of the past brings on destiny, yet we know that our destiny is to die. It is our ignorance of what happens after death which is intolerable.
Therefore we must commit ourselves to knowing fully the past and overcoming ignorance. We turn away from present and the future, so that we may be absolutely certain we've won the past. If we feel ourselves slipping in the present, we must commit to even deeper strata of memory, to deeper lessons of myth, archaeology and paleontology. And primatology. Yet the lessons we learn are of the dead who are no longer here. Even a method that uses the experiment that involves the death of organisms analyzes the effect of death of the living preparation. Death drastically intrudes into the animal or plant, though we may think we have just halted the life process in mid-stream and thus are studying life. We study ever more the act and effects of death in order to prepare for enhancing life. And there is no more "fertile"study of heightened preparedness for meeting destiny than in war. And no more eternal assurance than total war. War then becomes the peak experience of living.
Negations of openness to the future--the ignorance and the focus on memory--turn us into backward looking creatures, learning our lessons from ever deeper strata of the past in order that we may hold on to our grasp on security. Ignorance of the future and memory of the past are correlated forces, so that the more we divert ourselves by the study of death and thus turn from musing upon destiny, the more we think we control the past. If only we can control our fear of death do we presume to have a place in the eternal earth. We bluff, we take addictive substances, we arm ourselves to the teeth. Anything not to discern that nature involves something other than total struggle. Eternal recurrence is not a living testament from a living God. It is a dead earth. It is an earth run as a business undergoing a fire sale, in liquidation, with no care for future generations, no stewardship ethic, no concern for a greater good outside of warrior ancestors and warrior sons. The earth is plundered and set ablaze in a ritual of death that celebrates the victorious ancestor. The dead may live again unless the heirs catastrophically cede control of the present. Existentially, then, each present moment is devoted to control. Parents teach children war so that the parents may live again.
Therefore we must commit ourselves to knowing fully the past and overcoming ignorance. We turn away from present and the future, so that we may be absolutely certain we've won the past. If we feel ourselves slipping in the present, we must commit to even deeper strata of memory, to deeper lessons of myth, archaeology and paleontology. And primatology. Yet the lessons we learn are of the dead who are no longer here. Even a method that uses the experiment that involves the death of organisms analyzes the effect of death of the living preparation. Death drastically intrudes into the animal or plant, though we may think we have just halted the life process in mid-stream and thus are studying life. We study ever more the act and effects of death in order to prepare for enhancing life. And there is no more "fertile"study of heightened preparedness for meeting destiny than in war. And no more eternal assurance than total war. War then becomes the peak experience of living.
Negations of openness to the future--the ignorance and the focus on memory--turn us into backward looking creatures, learning our lessons from ever deeper strata of the past in order that we may hold on to our grasp on security. Ignorance of the future and memory of the past are correlated forces, so that the more we divert ourselves by the study of death and thus turn from musing upon destiny, the more we think we control the past. If only we can control our fear of death do we presume to have a place in the eternal earth. We bluff, we take addictive substances, we arm ourselves to the teeth. Anything not to discern that nature involves something other than total struggle. Eternal recurrence is not a living testament from a living God. It is a dead earth. It is an earth run as a business undergoing a fire sale, in liquidation, with no care for future generations, no stewardship ethic, no concern for a greater good outside of warrior ancestors and warrior sons. The earth is plundered and set ablaze in a ritual of death that celebrates the victorious ancestor. The dead may live again unless the heirs catastrophically cede control of the present. Existentially, then, each present moment is devoted to control. Parents teach children war so that the parents may live again.
From my vantage as a confessing Christian let me therefore suggest a reconfiguration of Burke’s popular quotation: “those who repeat history are destined.” These are those human moral nihilists who deny bearing the image of a peaceful and just God and thus try to impose their will on the living through domination or trickery toward their fantasies of the past, either in nature balanced solely by brutality or in some effortless paradise (powered by slaves or parents). The Hebrew and Christian scriptures repeatedly demonstrate that these are the ideas of dying Pharaohs and their dead imperial idols destined not to share in the living eternity. The living God won't have it. The living God desires progress in peacefulness, in courage, in commitment to life, in neighborliness so much that especially the fear of death be conquered. And that fear, to be vanquished, has to be unexpectedly conquered, by embracing death meekly through acceptance rather than going out in a blaze of self glorying violence. Only by this demonstration that includes a final blessing of forgiveness (the "victory of the Cross") may we escape our tendency to domination and relentless slave driving. For if we don't have hope for life after death, we wall off from life, turning away from being thankful for the sustaining function of nature. We expand total war to include a war on nature which we blame for our deaths. And the only way we can strategize against that nature is to create atavistic myths of fierce hominids or hominoids or whatever predator species we claim to understand.
Yet at Easter, we Christians testify to a hope of something better here and now and something truly good after death because we have tasted and experienced God’s goodness in the blessings we have been given. Those blessings includes the Good News of Easter and the gospel of Discipleship as we make our way towards death. We have a living hope and we have a trust and faith that helps us be alive, open to the future, not consoling ourselves by ever more revisions of the past that trap us in an ontology of death. Yet there is a way out of that trap, and we preach it in the Gospel every Sunday.
Yet at Easter, we Christians testify to a hope of something better here and now and something truly good after death because we have tasted and experienced God’s goodness in the blessings we have been given. Those blessings includes the Good News of Easter and the gospel of Discipleship as we make our way towards death. We have a living hope and we have a trust and faith that helps us be alive, open to the future, not consoling ourselves by ever more revisions of the past that trap us in an ontology of death. Yet there is a way out of that trap, and we preach it in the Gospel every Sunday.
Our hope as human beings, it is clear to me, is in our bearing the
image of God: active in history but constant in love and trusting that a Good God has a plan announced in the Gospel for reconciling humans with their God and with each other. What we make of that image and plan and experience of God's goodness shows us our eternal
destiny. We are not programmed, though
if God chooses, who can resist? I believe and trust that God preserves all present acts of love and justice eternally. We have a future if we commit now to repent from our will to cling to the past that only confirms time's and life's passing away.
Who among us feels that we do not
have free will? If not--if no free will--is regret for any
past action even possible? I testify to regrets, because I have misused my freedoms
to impose my will for something that denies freedom to others. My conscience convicts me. Whence comes that conscience? I believe professed atheists when they testify they have a moral center
and shy from doing harm to others. They too bear the image of God, though they may exchange it for idols. Even Christians who settle for a god stuck in the rut of past historical action--or worse, frozen historical roles--are
subject to idols.
In a way, we all are challenged
by this year’s calendar. Is the earth,
in the throes of a human induced major extinction event and resource shock, global warming, and
the rattling of weapons of mass destruction, really fit for eternal human
habitation? How then can destiny give any sense of hope or be the basis for any rational commitment? The alternative that asks no question that suggests meaning or purpose to life is in view, nihilism, is not on the moral plane of Hamlet. It is instead the suggestion that the only play in life is the tactic of Russian roulette, only that we may presume upon the ignorant "niceness" of those inclined to intervene when we put the gun to our or someone else's temple and start threatening to pull the trigger. Nihilism in the face of destiny is lethal. But who cares? Who really cares? As George W. Bush, after creating an Iraqi insurgency, taunted, "bring 'em on!"
We are also subjected to a petty choice by the calendar this year: April 1st, the day after Easter. We Christian fools went back to into the world committed in and communicating our Easter hope. We holy fools. That is the date I received the story of the young woman with the tenacious living arm and smile. I acknowledge a possibility that Christians are deluded in whole or in part--we all have our bouts with doubt. Jesus only seems not to doubt, though he struggles with fear and with temptation. That consoles me: God has chosen to share the struggle of humanity facing the inevitability and destiny of death. I do not write with bad faith. I believe in God's goodness. I believe that my faith has experiential and historical warrant.
------------------------------
We are also subjected to a petty choice by the calendar this year: April 1st, the day after Easter. We Christian fools went back to into the world committed in and communicating our Easter hope. We holy fools. That is the date I received the story of the young woman with the tenacious living arm and smile. I acknowledge a possibility that Christians are deluded in whole or in part--we all have our bouts with doubt. Jesus only seems not to doubt, though he struggles with fear and with temptation. That consoles me: God has chosen to share the struggle of humanity facing the inevitability and destiny of death. I do not write with bad faith. I believe in God's goodness. I believe that my faith has experiential and historical warrant.
------------------------------
During Lent this year, I noted
the hopeful trend that our government leaders seem to changing their stories in
a way that acknowledges what I believe strongly to be true. These are good steps. See here,
here,
here,
and here
for examples of officials recently changing their public testimony. The political economic situation is very fragile, but at least the truth telling has begun in government and it’s not possible to go back to
the old denials. The
political economic system continues to rob many of hope and security, but we must forgive all truth tellers, because eventually from truth comes goodness.
I read this
story in a hard copy newspaper on April 1. It tells a vignette of an ugly social reality in the recent political economy.
But I find hope in the truth telling and the commitment that this past will
not stand in 2014. This story suggests that leaders have the opportunity to commit to progress, to protest the ugliness of injustice. We all have the responsibility to commit to progress. I see signs of this
commitment blooming and taking root in many sectors. I
am hopeful. Truly hopeful. Momentum is building. I have some anxiety of the cost
of forgiveness and reconciliation that truth tellers and those who have been
politically and economically excluded must go through, but the process has
started. There’s no going back. Not possible. Thanks be to God.
So you who are holding out: whence comes your hope? Are you hiding your witness in order to fight
the liars with lies (or amorality with amorality), to come out of your secret places and claim you were on
the side of truth and morality all along? We church
folk have to forgive you, too. That's our task as we welcome you into the God-bearing image of repentant humanity. Yet consider
the path of reconciliation involved in that course of fighting fire with fire.
I am hopeful. Hallelujah. No exclamation point in 2013 without counting my blessings in the present. Hallelujah! The road to reconciliation is
long and hard. Consequences don’t vanish
without reconciliation, and even then possibly not entirely in this life. We don’t forget, perhaps
especially our own complicity. Yet, I don’t claim to be a victim, so I don't fully know the contours of memory of the truly brutalized: the raped, the orphaned and widowed, the maimed, the
dispossessed, the traumatized. I can accompany and learn from these as they tell their truth. I believe them. They bear the scars of the myth of destiny, and their telling the truth gives us all hope that they can and will triumph over that myth.
Where there is a spring tide of truth and hope there is life. That Easter Spring tide is here, blooming in the open light. Amen to truth where ever it emerges, and Amen to hope. Jesus is indeed risen for me to commit to life here and now.
Where there is a spring tide of truth and hope there is life. That Easter Spring tide is here, blooming in the open light. Amen to truth where ever it emerges, and Amen to hope. Jesus is indeed risen for me to commit to life here and now.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Political Action and the Power of No for the Remnant Church
Political Action and the Power of No for the
Remnant Church
Rev. Douglas Olds
18 March 2013
As a critical voice of social and
political structures in America today I am occasionally asked why I do not go
into politics myself. The short answer
is that I have a sense of God’s calling to my present ministry. The longer answer is that I pursued doctoral
studies in Policy Analysis and Formation during the Clinton administration and
had my politics and programs rejected in the course of proposing a critical
dissertation of what was then being called “globalization.” From
the perspectives of my environmental and social justice commitments at the
time, I believed that the concerted moves by governing, academic, and corporate
elites to radically loosen regulation on capital flows and money creation, to equate free trade in goods with offshoring of jobs while ceding domestic sovereignty to
international trade tribunals (NAFTA, GATT, WTO, MAI) were not in the public
interest as I understood the public interest.
I recognized these political movements as private interests banding
together for private gains, at the same time transferring costs and risk (“externalities”)
to the public in the form of debt, reduced social safety nets and environmental conditions except in the backyard of the privileged. I believe that the last 20 years have borne
out these concerns while creating many more that I did not foresee.
At the time of my training in
policy development and studies, I learned that my ideas of serving the public
good in proposals and analysis were received by most of my instructors and my
peers-in-training as just some personal preference of mine. In other words, there was an ideology at my university that perhaps accepted that concern for the public good made expedient political
rhetoric, but that all political programs and political action were motivated
exclusively by self-interest. Social
justice, taking care of the poor, and substantive environmental protection were not on the
agenda of the controlling powers at that time, and my career of proposing
positive policy as a student of the public good died a Hobbesian death: my political training was brutish, nasty, and short.
As I moved on from academics, I
found myself more socially "successful" in pursuing independent work and small partnerships. Large-scale collective organizing
unfortunately is not an innate skill of mine.
I pursued my critical scholarship outside the academy, and later, on God’s
initiative, I was called into the Reformed Church and then to ordained ministry. I discern that God has some small call for a critic’s interdisciplinary training. I am increasingly appalled by concentrated
power and the breakdown of checks and balances to that power. I am appalled at the creation of a society that exchanges citizenship
for consumerism and that treats people who lack utility to moneyed interests as
a material good to be propagandized, militarized, hyper-sexualized, anatomically commoditized, traded, bartered,
policed, and finally thrown away into prisons or back alleys.
I exercise my voice of
criticism while balancing elements of proportion and
optimism. It’s not all condemnation and
pessimism all the time, nor is it all pie in the sky escapism. Either
way, I’m sure in my enthusiasms and concerns I may at times lose sight of this life here and now. I give voice to my concerns in church and also independently
in my daily activities and friendships.
I wondered recently if I’m a political dissident, but two friends told
me independently that I sounded like a patriot to them, that I was someone who
was raised in privilege but also on the civic narratives of ideals in the
American founding including the "checks and balances"on concentrated power, self-evident human rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, elite obligations to the less
fortunate, and in the reestablishment of the Republic on the basis of equality as the Civil War evolved.
So, the question is posed to me: I
hear your criticism, what are you doing about it? Why don’t you go into politics? Hanani the Seer railed with truth outside King Asa’s palace and
was imprisoned (2 Chr 16), Jeremiah the prophet thrown down a well by Zedekiah's henchmen (Jer 38). With more menacing technology, dissidents in South and Central America were thrown alive from
planes and helicopters into the heights over the ocean. What is
accomplished? The Voice Crying in the Wilderness I saw in Hyde Park was ignored in the 1980s. In the 1990s, that voice was likely
to be medicated. Now, there is a chilling trend to
throw those voices into privatized prisons to be silenced by solitary confinement
and, it is reported, torture.
There is indeed a role for
Christians in political action. Some
denominations shy from it. There is the
regular anchorite, puritan and monastic tendencies in Christianity to withdraw
from society and from politics. My
Reformed tradition embraces social engagement.
My denomination for years has engaged in lobbying for positive policy
change in Washington, DC, through its own central office and through
partnerships with other Reformed, Protestant, ecumenical, and interfaith
structures. Tragically, these policy
efforts are being curtailed as our denomination shrinks demographically, as our
congregations age and go on fixed income, and as what relatively few young
people we draw face reduced employment and earnings prospects. The voice of my Reformed, Presbyterian
Christianity--marginalized as it has been since the 1960s in offering positive
policy proposals--ebbs. According to the reports I read and trust, most Christian denominations in America seem to be moving toward minority political status. Some denominations and churches are looking to the signs of the times in
the militarized Middle East for the prophesied Armageddon to humanity’s end time
of yearning. Many in my own denomination
hope for a more peaceful extension of humanity’s time on earth while decrying
the militarization at home. We are
learning to hear the voice coming from the global south—from Africa and central
and South America as we discern the Holy Spirit’s increasingly moving in and
through these regions, seemingly changing the center of gravity of faith from
outside the Mediterranean cradle of the church and its privileged experiment in colonization in North America.
The Holy Spirit seems clearly to be reconfirming Jesus’s preferential
option for the poor in leaving a remnant for American and European
Christianity.
Yet in North America, where
democracy is bartered away in overt power grabs justified by GNP, the United States may have already entered a third type of republic—oligarchy.
What earnest political program may be offered in a republic that has exchanged democratic deliberation for secrecy and ceding of sovereignty to an international class of mobile financiers? To such a political moment that has lost sight of earnest moral language, there seems only the presumption that power understands NO. Moral exhortation in my experience is not just denied by this class, not just dismissed, it seems no longer to be heard by many of our elites. It seems that they do not see care of others or self-sacrifice outside of immediate families or what military medals they award. Or so it seems to me, informed by my religious tradition:
Psalm 49.20 (NIV) People who have wealth but lack understanding
are like the beasts that perish.
Are we to engage the deaf and unseeing like they have living hearts (Lu 24.5; Lu 9.60)? Animals showing us talon, claw, and fang are we to counter by demonstrating our entreaties, tears, and positive suasion? We don't give up trying and evangelizing--with the message of hope, forgiveness, and God's love--but in addition to that ongoing work, there is another tactic, a Biblical way. The Biblical way of saying firmly and with the conviction of the spirit: NO.
Understandably, the idea of a new “revolution” is proposed in the margins of the Occupy Movement, though I am committed to non-violence as the meaning of “turn the other cheek” available to us in Jesus’ message. I am reminded of William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade for abolition, which he began in the 1820s and pursued non-violently for close to 40 years. As the political compromises of the 1850s rolled back his achievements and became even more committed to eternal slavery, Garrison recognized that non-violence was not going to achieve his social ends of justice and non-domination. He came to understand that injustice may escalate into expiatory bloodletting. In my view, it’s not some retributive action or character of God that demands violence for injustice, but that God has built into humanity the cosmic foundation and expectation of justice, so that when a class of oligarchs denies justice to a minority for long enough, even the majority revolts. The social bond and trust is destroyed and atavistic, irrational, and cruel forces may too often be unleashed. Notoriously, both sides of the Civil War in America believed God sanctioned their systems of political economy. Many on both sides were willing to take up arms and even commit atrocities in the furtherance of their own moral certitude in God’s will. I believe I understand God’s will in both slavery and in taking care of the poor and infirm in our own society. I recognize, like Garrison, that violence may be inevitable. However, I cannot embrace it as a positive policy option for the church as I understand Jesus’s instructions to it.
Psalm 49.20 (NIV) People who have wealth but lack understanding
are like the beasts that perish.
Are we to engage the deaf and unseeing like they have living hearts (Lu 24.5; Lu 9.60)? Animals showing us talon, claw, and fang are we to counter by demonstrating our entreaties, tears, and positive suasion? We don't give up trying and evangelizing--with the message of hope, forgiveness, and God's love--but in addition to that ongoing work, there is another tactic, a Biblical way. The Biblical way of saying firmly and with the conviction of the spirit: NO.
Understandably, the idea of a new “revolution” is proposed in the margins of the Occupy Movement, though I am committed to non-violence as the meaning of “turn the other cheek” available to us in Jesus’ message. I am reminded of William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade for abolition, which he began in the 1820s and pursued non-violently for close to 40 years. As the political compromises of the 1850s rolled back his achievements and became even more committed to eternal slavery, Garrison recognized that non-violence was not going to achieve his social ends of justice and non-domination. He came to understand that injustice may escalate into expiatory bloodletting. In my view, it’s not some retributive action or character of God that demands violence for injustice, but that God has built into humanity the cosmic foundation and expectation of justice, so that when a class of oligarchs denies justice to a minority for long enough, even the majority revolts. The social bond and trust is destroyed and atavistic, irrational, and cruel forces may too often be unleashed. Notoriously, both sides of the Civil War in America believed God sanctioned their systems of political economy. Many on both sides were willing to take up arms and even commit atrocities in the furtherance of their own moral certitude in God’s will. I believe I understand God’s will in both slavery and in taking care of the poor and infirm in our own society. I recognize, like Garrison, that violence may be inevitable. However, I cannot embrace it as a positive policy option for the church as I understand Jesus’s instructions to it.
Which brings me to my
conclusion. I renounce violence to redress injustice. For myself and for any who are convinced by this communal reading
of the Bible. I say “no, thou shalt not!" to killing, to
Drone strikes against citizens or against non-combatants. Even against foreign,
suspected or known terrorists. I say "no, thou shalt not!" to torture or corporal punishment of any kind, to military escalations, to “preventive”
war, to war to further capitalist market access or resources.
I say no to glorifications of violence, rape, economic domination, machismo, and environmental racism. I say no to disestablishing social safety nets, to reducing labor protections, to environmental degradation and global race-to-the bottom “harmonization” of environmental regulation. I say no to secrecy, to National Security Letters, to imprisoning and intimidating whistle blowers. I say no to privatizing humanity’s global endowment of plant genomes by agribusiness, no the grant of extra-constitutional intellectual property protections to genetic modifiers of seed stocks, no to privatization of peasant lands in Chiapas, Darfur, and Vietnam so that elites in the capitals of Mexico and Sudan can generate rents and taxes (and in Hanoi to generate commissions from corporations) to pay off their foreign bondholders. I say no to death squads enabled by foreign governments to carry out that privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, in El Salvador, in Guatemala and elsewhere. I say NO to the "neo-slavery" in prisons, and to all private capitalization in both the law writing and the incarceration sector. I could go on. This is the arena for the power of NO to be exercised, and I believe it is the primary political program that the current age allows to people of faith and social conscience. If American citizens are only validated and empowered as consumers, we have shrinking power for positive redress and have only the right of voice or exit, to take our business elsewhere, to say NO to the corporations, courts and universities offering us these consumerist visions of disposable society and disposable humanity.
I say no to glorifications of violence, rape, economic domination, machismo, and environmental racism. I say no to disestablishing social safety nets, to reducing labor protections, to environmental degradation and global race-to-the bottom “harmonization” of environmental regulation. I say no to secrecy, to National Security Letters, to imprisoning and intimidating whistle blowers. I say no to privatizing humanity’s global endowment of plant genomes by agribusiness, no the grant of extra-constitutional intellectual property protections to genetic modifiers of seed stocks, no to privatization of peasant lands in Chiapas, Darfur, and Vietnam so that elites in the capitals of Mexico and Sudan can generate rents and taxes (and in Hanoi to generate commissions from corporations) to pay off their foreign bondholders. I say no to death squads enabled by foreign governments to carry out that privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, in El Salvador, in Guatemala and elsewhere. I say NO to the "neo-slavery" in prisons, and to all private capitalization in both the law writing and the incarceration sector. I could go on. This is the arena for the power of NO to be exercised, and I believe it is the primary political program that the current age allows to people of faith and social conscience. If American citizens are only validated and empowered as consumers, we have shrinking power for positive redress and have only the right of voice or exit, to take our business elsewhere, to say NO to the corporations, courts and universities offering us these consumerist visions of disposable society and disposable humanity.
This power of NO as mentioned above
historically has been accompanied by religious EXIT. The Puritans left Holland
for England in the 1600s because of their persecution by power at home, then
left for the New World. Exit has traditionally
been a political option in the church. My Protestant forerunners exited
Rome. John the Baptist exited the
temple, ancient Copts exited to the desert to fight their demons unimpeded by
the social structures of their day. Yet
I do not promote the option of EXIT as the only policy program. If violence is to break out (and has broken
out domestically in mass homicide, suicide and PTSD), I believe the church is there to bind up the psychic and spiritual wounds with God’s help.
I believe that the Bible speaks to me about a
political program for the declining mainstream church in America. The Bible has multiple voices and I wish others
of good will well who generate other visions and have the skills and calling
for collective action. But for me, God does not
in those scriptures lay out a comprehensive blueprint for the ordering of society. There is in the Hebrew Scriptures a positive
vision of the temple and of worship, but God initially dissuades the people’s
demand for a king. When the people
previously looked to faithful men and women for examples of righteous living, as
the Book of Judges reports, there was some basis for localized peace. The monarch and his servant, however, will TAKE, as the Prophet Samuel warns (1 Sa 8).
A millennium later, Jesus offers
programs of non-violence and religious justice but offers love's guidance alone for structuring human economic governance. These necessarily includes the liberty from anxiety (Lu 12.22), greed (Mt. 6.19-24), and
hoarding (Lu 12. 16-21) that faithfulness demands. Subject to this rule of love, the Bible seems to endow humanity with extensive liberties in
creating economic and social relationships yet has strong egalitarian morality in the parables of compensation of workers by ownership (e.g. Mt 20).
God’s specific social guidance for all, which is universal for believers and non-believers alike, is expressed in the 9 NOs of the Decalogue (The 10 Commandments' "Thou shalt NOT"). Later Israelite kings
violate the expectation of justice by enslaving and impoverishing the poor and
expropriating lands, and the prophets said NO without delicacy (e.g. Elijah to Ahab for the murder of Naboth for his vineyard, 1 Ki 21).
Jesus reconfirms the Decalogue
provisions at various times during his ministry, strengthening and re-focusing
his followers on their spiritual intent (e.g. Mt 5).
Christians may be in some sense free from Law as some claim Paul states (though not in my theological tradition of the 3-fold uses of the Law), but
non-faithful powers certainly are not (Ro 7.7-8.4)! They like all of us will be judged for what they themselves
know are violations of moral law, even the most contemptuous of them without fear
of God in their eyes.
While I’d like to think that Christians have the regular opportunity to be asked into policy councils to promote a vision of the public good in American society today, that invitation is not only mostly withdrawn, it seems unrealistic to expect its re-extension soon to the cloakrooms and hallways of power. Optimism, idealism, and dreamers flourish at the community level, in relationship, in the face to face where humanity and decency is engaged and supported. At a time when critical policy voices are faint (though growing!) in Congress and in the socially prestigious universities, I believe it is the role of all religions and of my Reformed Christianity to be the critical voice to secret and concentrated power, speaking consistently God’s truth to power. That truth is that God is saying NO! and Thou Shalt NOT! to what power establishments are doing to God’s righteous domestically and abroad. That message of critique and analysis of systemic evil is the political role I see for my ministry in the present age. Of course, we say yes to positive steps as they occur, but I believe the role of the faithful is to act and speak locally. The days of Mr. Smith going to Congress or (even if the current President reads him) Reinhold Niebuhr being invited to the White House seem cut short in the current regime. I can so hope and pray for political renewal and revival, and will not stop. There had to be many who prayed for Abraham Lincoln as he struggled and wept, as I believe he most certainly did. Without prophesying, the current national political situation suggests to me a dawn of a remnant church (Ro 11. 2-6) in the West as the politics of exclusion works out its manifest destiny.
While I’d like to think that Christians have the regular opportunity to be asked into policy councils to promote a vision of the public good in American society today, that invitation is not only mostly withdrawn, it seems unrealistic to expect its re-extension soon to the cloakrooms and hallways of power. Optimism, idealism, and dreamers flourish at the community level, in relationship, in the face to face where humanity and decency is engaged and supported. At a time when critical policy voices are faint (though growing!) in Congress and in the socially prestigious universities, I believe it is the role of all religions and of my Reformed Christianity to be the critical voice to secret and concentrated power, speaking consistently God’s truth to power. That truth is that God is saying NO! and Thou Shalt NOT! to what power establishments are doing to God’s righteous domestically and abroad. That message of critique and analysis of systemic evil is the political role I see for my ministry in the present age. Of course, we say yes to positive steps as they occur, but I believe the role of the faithful is to act and speak locally. The days of Mr. Smith going to Congress or (even if the current President reads him) Reinhold Niebuhr being invited to the White House seem cut short in the current regime. I can so hope and pray for political renewal and revival, and will not stop. There had to be many who prayed for Abraham Lincoln as he struggled and wept, as I believe he most certainly did. Without prophesying, the current national political situation suggests to me a dawn of a remnant church (Ro 11. 2-6) in the West as the politics of exclusion works out its manifest destiny.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Sermon responding to Friday's Sandy Hook mass killing of first graders
Children in Connecticut rampage, all 6 and 7, shot repeatedly
Pray Angrily, Renounce Violence, and Reduce Stigma
A Sermon Response to Friday's Mass Killing of 1st Graders in Connecticut
Sunday, December 16, 2012
When I was a chaplain, the parents of a 5 year old brought him to the emergency room, where he died in front of my eyes as the ER staff worked furiously to revive him. The cause of death was respiratory complications of H1N1 flu. As the doctors were working to revive the boy, I found myself looking to see the face of my own 5 year old, Evan, on that table. I wondered to myself why I was so intent in seeing Evan's face on that ER bed, gone forever. I knew it wasn't Evan, but there I was closely focused on the face of that boy wondering how it would feel if it were. I felt sick.
Then I looked to the parents whom I would soon have to try to offer words of spiritual care. The boy's mother was sobbing and flushed, the father was ashen, his face drained of blood, mostly keeping his arms folded and regularly turning away from watching the drama of resuscitation. I was both of those parents inside myself, but was I really? I felt so wretched for those parents and in doubt as to my abilities. As often happened to me in the ER, adrenaline took hold and I struggled to slow my breathing in order to calm myself. I don't know if my being a father helped my words or not, but I did my best. I did my job. I stood vigil with the parents as they tried to understand, to accept. It was that moment when I hated my job. The death of children made me question why God had created this moment, or created the way God did, and why God left me holding the bag to cover for Him/Her. Is God unable to prevent these deaths? Does God have that power but just does not choose in this case to apply it? If the latter, why does she hold his followers up to the anger and ridicule of grieving people: you mean you believe your god could have helped our child but didn't???? So, I find that on the front lines of pastoral care, during family and social crises, when pastors and spiritual care workers are asked to justify God to others, we are tempted to shrink and say something like:
actually, God does not have all that power the Bible says He has. He Himself is limited by the freedom of evil, and He suffers with us, like Jesus suffered on the Cross. Look for God's presence with you and in you. That is the compassion of God who has taken on our flesh to experience what we feel, and maybe to guide us better in our human task of compassion.
But that explanation does not really cut it, does it? Why worship or put your trust in such? The reality is that people as they feel the gamut of emotions and anguish at death of children turn to the church for answers, and yet we can give them very little but our prayers. And maybe also we give them our "permission" to express their anger that they feel with God in these moments. That permission to express anger at God and our companionship and vigil, rather than our explanation of why God is either powerless or unwilling to prevent the most senseless death of children, is what Christian spiritual leaders may offer. It's not much, it's very little, but it may be all that is allowed us. That permission to "lament," to find fault with God, is part of our Biblical tradition in the Psalms of Lament, though I do not offer a quote from the Psalms in the immediacy of such loss. The Talmud notes, "The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it has.” We keep our prayers brief and angry when children die. For children die senselessly. They die in wombs because of some horrible failure of nature, they die in warfare as "collateral damage" from aggressive power. They die of neglect, and hunger, and violent abuse. They die in all the circumstances, innocent of any sin that I can discern, innocent of any provocation to parents, to authority, to their parent's enemies, to God. And sometimes they die close to home, and that's when we grieve more deeply and demand more explanation. Maybe we shouldn't, but we do.
I read the news reports Friday and the reactions of pundits, religious and political leaders and friends on social media. The children in Connecticut who were killed were 1st graders, which is the stage of Evan now! I had that familiar reaction: what if that had been Evan and his classmates? I found myself cycling through the dimensions of anguish: anger, sadness, and numbness. It was not grief, or so I thought, because it really had not happened to me. I watched in the media as the reactions ran the gamut that I felt: fear that it could happen to mine, anger at the gun culture in America, and sorrowful petitions for prayer to all affected. My colleague Rev. Diana Bell describes my state of mind when she applies Romans 8.26: ."for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words."
We demand explanation of God and it doesn't come, so we in civil society and in the church offer explanation. It's the ease of gun access, it's the pervasiveness of gun culture, the program of 2nd Amendment zealots, it's the failure of the mental health profession, it's the failure of politics that de-funds social programs as it seems to structurally limit opportunities for universal human welfare. It's a problem within ourselves, the forces of violence and life-negating sin that infects humanity due to our estrangement from God. I believe the explanation for what happened to those children at Sandy Hook involves all of those things and more. Because the church knows that it must offer more than prayer and some scripture reading on Sunday, the church gets involved in offering solutions based on some amalgam of these explanations. On the conservative side, the church identifies systemic sin in the people that God is punishing as an explanation for the death, so its solution is to get back on God's good side as a nation and as an individual. On the liberal side, the solution is more government services for individuals who are mentally ill to cure, isolate, or otherwise pacify urges to violence and killing. Or more gun control. Then there are the solutions that gun violence is only stopped by more guns in the hands of citizens, but I'd like to think, naively perhaps, that particular option is beyond the pale in a religion of peace.
Since the news reports of Sandy Hook, I've been spending most of my weekend with my children. We've been spending time singing Christmas Carols. Part of that sharing is to cement my bond with these gifts from God as their safety and welfare is risked by such a violent and sick culture of death making. I also took them to the movie, "Rise of the Guardians." I did so with trepidation. Beforehand, I checked parental movie review sites to determine the spiritual message of the movie for children who believe in Santa, but have been raised (at my insistence) without the Easter Bunny. The movie had both characters acting as peers in their protective role of children in the world.
The "Christian parents' movie review site" offered relatively little warning about the movie. It was almost wholly positive of the movie's suitability for Christian children. Yet, as the movie was concluded, the "protection" offered by the guardian Santa and Easter Bunny was revealed to be little but a more violent, forceful power than the bad spirit's power. Is that a spiritual message for my children?
I asked them, "Do you think that Santa would protect you by punching the Boogey Man harder than the Boogey Man punches him?" My kids know a loaded question from their minister dad when they hear it. They answered, No. Well, what is the protective power of Santa? That one was a bit more difficult, but they've heard enough from me to finally propose, "love." So then I asked them about the climactic scene when the children in the movie restored power to the guardians after they had lost it. What had the children in the movie done? My children could not remember, but I did. I recalled for them that the children stood firm, afraid but steadfast and non-assertive to the threatening dark clouds of power. It was the children's steadfastness and non-provocation which saved the day. That was a Christmas message, I suggested. My boys seemed to understand, but I often wonder if we in the church believe our message of the power of non-violent steadfastness? Or do we instead adopt the culture's view that goodness just has more firepower than evil, like America against its enemies, or the white hats' transcendentally better aim than the black hats', or like Santa and the Easter Bunny's muscular force that vanquishes the boogey man in "Rise of the Guardians." I don't know for a fact that my message that doubts these fundamentally American myths is what will keep my children, your children, or any other people safe from assault and death, but it's the message of hope that we've been given as an alternative to intensifying the arming and violence in our society, which is clearly not working.
I asked them, "Do you think that Santa would protect you by punching the Boogey Man harder than the Boogey Man punches him?" My kids know a loaded question from their minister dad when they hear it. They answered, No. Well, what is the protective power of Santa? That one was a bit more difficult, but they've heard enough from me to finally propose, "love." So then I asked them about the climactic scene when the children in the movie restored power to the guardians after they had lost it. What had the children in the movie done? My children could not remember, but I did. I recalled for them that the children stood firm, afraid but steadfast and non-assertive to the threatening dark clouds of power. It was the children's steadfastness and non-provocation which saved the day. That was a Christmas message, I suggested. My boys seemed to understand, but I often wonder if we in the church believe our message of the power of non-violent steadfastness? Or do we instead adopt the culture's view that goodness just has more firepower than evil, like America against its enemies, or the white hats' transcendentally better aim than the black hats', or like Santa and the Easter Bunny's muscular force that vanquishes the boogey man in "Rise of the Guardians." I don't know for a fact that my message that doubts these fundamentally American myths is what will keep my children, your children, or any other people safe from assault and death, but it's the message of hope that we've been given as an alternative to intensifying the arming and violence in our society, which is clearly not working.
So that's my first part of a message regarding the threat that our children and all of society is under: the church needs a consistent though realistic message of non-violence while it acknowledges the cost and eruptions of fear that reliance on non-violence entails. Fear is adaptive and natural, we need more intensively to acknowledge, and contrast it with the message of the armed-to-the-teeth, "shock and awe" practicing American hero. We need to name the bluff that culture portrays as the ideal--violence and threat without a trace of fear. Yet there has to be a real acknowledgement of the certainty of blow back and the cycle of retributive violence that history demonstrates over and over again, in ever evolving historical and social contexts.
Bravery based on non- violent faith risks, knowing the fear of uncertainty. This accords with my understanding of what God requires of us: steadfastness in the force of good, even knowing fully the reality of human history, where martyrs died and that good does not always triumph in the short term. But the risk, the cost, the steadfastness, the fear, and yet the bravery of non-violence, solidarity, and prayer seems is all that God gives us to reform the guns and oppression of the world.
For me, we in the church need to remove ourselves as a justifying organ of the guns and national security argument to focus mainly on chaplaincy and pastoral care to those recovering from the front lines of violent conflict and collateral trauma, and we need to promote a message against the taking up of guns in support of the self. The children at Sandy Hook weren't protected from slaughter by this ethic of non-violence and refusal to bear arms, I fully understand. But I submit that we do not protect our children with a culture that proposes that the forces of good are just better armed than the forces of darkness and dysfunction, because this supports the endless violence of escalating culture of deadly force, "standing one's ground" laws, and preemptive violence. "Turn the other cheek" means something real and political. It is not pie in the sky: it entails risk, cost, and sometimes injury, confinement, and death. Sometimes tragic death of innocent children. We don't go to pieces when a child in a foreign land is killed by an American drone (though there should be much more of our protest). There is no other way than breaking the cycle of violence than with non-violence. Bull Connor will turn his fire-hose on some of us, Richard Daley will swing his blackjacks against some of our heads, and some people like Bradley Manning and Nelson Mandela will know the isolation of probably decades of prison for ripping away the veil of secrecy, lies and corruption that enable and excuse violence done in our names. Some individuals will lose, but we can be steadfast if not sure of our task and of God's ultimate power.
Associated with removing arms and guns from society, we the church need to turn off the violence in our culture by refusing to economically support ever more graphic violent commerce in art and entertainment--enough is enough--including by getting our youth and young adults off of what looks to me like addiction (compulsion) to violent video games. Political, economic, and social action will be necessary and may indeed fail in the short term, but even that failed social action might save lives. Action may require that Christians make pragmatic political alliances with people who think like Bill Maher, who tweeted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook murder spree: "Sorry but prayers and giving your kids hugs fix nothing; only having the balls to stand up to our insane selfish gun culture will." I disagree with the first half of that statement, but I take Maher's point that hugs and prayers aren't sufficient (though I affirm they are necessary). I can make common ground with Maher's point of view, offensive as it is, if it results in meaningful gun control and a less overt culture of violence and killing.
Bravery based on non- violent faith risks, knowing the fear of uncertainty. This accords with my understanding of what God requires of us: steadfastness in the force of good, even knowing fully the reality of human history, where martyrs died and that good does not always triumph in the short term. But the risk, the cost, the steadfastness, the fear, and yet the bravery of non-violence, solidarity, and prayer seems is all that God gives us to reform the guns and oppression of the world.
For me, we in the church need to remove ourselves as a justifying organ of the guns and national security argument to focus mainly on chaplaincy and pastoral care to those recovering from the front lines of violent conflict and collateral trauma, and we need to promote a message against the taking up of guns in support of the self. The children at Sandy Hook weren't protected from slaughter by this ethic of non-violence and refusal to bear arms, I fully understand. But I submit that we do not protect our children with a culture that proposes that the forces of good are just better armed than the forces of darkness and dysfunction, because this supports the endless violence of escalating culture of deadly force, "standing one's ground" laws, and preemptive violence. "Turn the other cheek" means something real and political. It is not pie in the sky: it entails risk, cost, and sometimes injury, confinement, and death. Sometimes tragic death of innocent children. We don't go to pieces when a child in a foreign land is killed by an American drone (though there should be much more of our protest). There is no other way than breaking the cycle of violence than with non-violence. Bull Connor will turn his fire-hose on some of us, Richard Daley will swing his blackjacks against some of our heads, and some people like Bradley Manning and Nelson Mandela will know the isolation of probably decades of prison for ripping away the veil of secrecy, lies and corruption that enable and excuse violence done in our names. Some individuals will lose, but we can be steadfast if not sure of our task and of God's ultimate power.
Associated with removing arms and guns from society, we the church need to turn off the violence in our culture by refusing to economically support ever more graphic violent commerce in art and entertainment--enough is enough--including by getting our youth and young adults off of what looks to me like addiction (compulsion) to violent video games. Political, economic, and social action will be necessary and may indeed fail in the short term, but even that failed social action might save lives. Action may require that Christians make pragmatic political alliances with people who think like Bill Maher, who tweeted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook murder spree: "Sorry but prayers and giving your kids hugs fix nothing; only having the balls to stand up to our insane selfish gun culture will." I disagree with the first half of that statement, but I take Maher's point that hugs and prayers aren't sufficient (though I affirm they are necessary). I can make common ground with Maher's point of view, offensive as it is, if it results in meaningful gun control and a less overt culture of violence and killing.
As the questions and anger evolve today, the media and my friends are now beginning the expected refocusing on mental illness as the unaddressed problem within society which in part explains this tragedy. Yet, notwithstanding that most mentally ill people are not violent, including those who are in active psychotic states, it is a fact that mental illness is stigmatized by incidents like these. This stigma makes it less likely that people will seek treatment from the mental health field. Stigma thus has some real effect on the recurrence of tragic violence and of the epidemic of suicide. I cannot see how increasing firepower in our private homes and streets by arming citizens makes either epidemic from getting worse.
I will offer one specific, concrete suggestion for the church in the crisis of mental health in America. And that is, the church and its leaders need to take risks to open up about their own struggles with mental illness. According to the anecdotal and personal stories that I hear, depression is represented in pastoral leadership and in the congregations. Yet pastoral leaders feel they might pay a professional and economic price were they to open up to their congregations and to society with their struggles and their insights, even their triumphs. Church members with the same struggle might move to support their leaders if they hear these stories, thus reducing the fear and stigma in the congregation. That is the role and task of pastoral leaders and our congregations, to take risks to change stigmas, fears, and dysfunctions of the times. Stigma of the "abnormal" drives people with mental health issues away from treatment and the church. Where else but the church can challenge spiritual stigmatization and taboo? Like every thing else that testifies to God's love, it will take our courage and commitment. May it be so.
To sum up the message of my sermon today: we the church have more to offer this crisis of mass violence against our children and our vulnerable that erupt in society. It has more to offer than short, angry prayer, psalms, and pragmatic alliances for political change. Those are necessary, but not sufficient. The church is not a political movement, but rather an institution from our Lord Jesus Christ to offer testimony to the truth of God's entering our lives for the better, and the difficult, though that sometimes entails struggle and pain. If we offer our testimony to our own angry struggles with God and our debilitating struggles with mental illness, then our coming out the other side, we speak authentically and deeply to those who look to us for guidance in times of senseless crisis. And this is a message to all who struggle with mental illness: find ways to reduce stigma. Tell your story, understand that the vast majority of people who are in despair and in psychosis are moral agents, not inhuman monsters that we should be afraid of. Telling our story requires risk. But risk is the price for social change, the change that we all want.
Stop the cycle in every act of faith and love we can muster, for God takes on the ultimate responsibility for the cycle of violence when God says, "I will repay" (Romans 12.19). This sums up my understanding of God's awesome creative power: it acts gently now through love, but something is in abeyance. Something awesome, as the Prophet Amos (5.24) details of God's spoken words, like a prayer but certain: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
Come Lord Jesus! Amen.
Stop the cycle in every act of faith and love we can muster, for God takes on the ultimate responsibility for the cycle of violence when God says, "I will repay" (Romans 12.19). This sums up my understanding of God's awesome creative power: it acts gently now through love, but something is in abeyance. Something awesome, as the Prophet Amos (5.24) details of God's spoken words, like a prayer but certain: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
Come Lord Jesus! Amen.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
R. Dawkins boxing outside his weight, Protein, and the evolution of a pastor
[My intellectual journey from Darwin back to Darwin, meeting Jesus Christ and Richard Dawkins along the way. I say little of Jesus, but Dawkins really helps, though not in the way he intends.]
I was trained in what was called "Neo-Darwinian Biology" at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s. I concentrated in Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and Anthropology, taking a major in Zoology. I studied with a sophomore's testosterone-induced rage for E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology" and Ethology with Richard Alexander. I read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I took upper-level undergraduate classes in Genetics, I discussed the popular, sexist paraphrase attributed to an anthropologist in recent news that men wage war because women are watching. I took a graduate level class in biochemistry. This undergraduate training was the foundation of my worldview until after I turned 30 when I began to doubt the reductionist view of Neo-Darwinism.
Philip Johnson's book Reason in the Balance was assigned to me for graduate exams in the year of its publication, 1996. In it, he posed a challenge for reductionist genetics. He posed the problem of the folding and abiotic replication of proteins. What follows in this paragraph is my understanding of the challenge and not Johnson's. (If you are uninterested in reading my formulation of technical problems, skip the bracketed text down to the final two sentences of the next paragraph).
[I understood and continue to understand that proteins were incredibly unlikely to spontaneously arise by chance because their constituent amino acids had to be assembled in a certain order (and in a certain surrounding physical and chemical matrix) to fold into a structure that had adaptive significance for a living organism. This problem of "origins biology" made sense to me from my undergraduate study of biology and biochemistry two decades prior. Assembly of folded molecular proteins required some informational mechanism to guide any re-assembly, or evolution through natural selection could never "take off." In other words, proteins' originating by chance in a primordial, abiotic environment were improbable in a mathematically factorial sense. Second, an even more complex system of information transmission for reassembly/replication had to be developed by chance IN CONCERT with the independent assembly of the protein. Both of these processes were resulting from chance and not by biotic, metabolic evolution. Organic Evolution proceeds toward a threshold metabolic complexity if there is adaptive significance of an element (protein, structure, RNA, etc.) to a living organism. There is no "partial" adaptive value to either a partially folded protein or a partially instituted information transmission system in abiotic isolation. At least that's how I was trained. I recognized a problem with the Neo-Darwinian synthesis: it could not even plausibly venture to explain the origins of life. To my understanding, Evolutionary biologists since the 1920s dismiss this line of probabilistic reasoning as Hoyle's Fallacy. However, it is not at all clear to me how partial proteins have adaptive significance outside of a cell or protocell. More about this below.
[Since then, "self-assembly" of proteins and protocells have been proposed, but that does not seem satisfactory to me as a scientific explanation. Remember, I am in the mid-1990s struggling with the chemistry of the origin of pre-biotic proteins and RNA and I am in my philosophy, not a Christian, not a theist. I am an educated, though not professional, Darwinian and Naturalist 20 years out of practice. You may dismiss me as naive, amateur, and "unbright.", but it might be argued that my undergraduate training (graduated with the Bachelor of Science "with Distinction") at the University of Michigan did not meet the challenges of my layperson future. My naturalism was shaken to the core by the implausibility of chance spontaneously generating this dual track, non-Darwinian system of single protein replication. And chance had to do this hugely improbable assembly of a single protein over and over until a hereditary mechanism could co-assemble and somehow harmonize with the protein's structure and amino acid kinematics in pre-biotic conditions. I then thought about the magnitudes of improbability due to randomness involved in the creation of a single protocell with metabolism and an information system that was heritable across generations. Evolutionary Biologists, used to this incredulity, claimed that the origin of the cell was irrelevant to the truth of Natural Selection operating on extant organisms, which I still believe is established scientific fact.]
However, the problem of the origin of life and the neo-Darwinist failure to solve that problem or even propose a plausible research program shook my naturalism to the core. A critic might term my intellectual doubts a fall into "creationism, intelligent design delusion." Or, perhaps more charitably, I could be seen as seduced by the "god of the gaps" for a divine explanation during that interim science had or has not yet adequately and experimentally settled. Yet the origin and maintenance of life is to me a qualitatively different philosophical puzzle than the operation of differential death and failure to reproduce--the culling or weeding out of the weak and maladapted. How chance as a life-giving force in the generation of adaptive mutation and necessity of staving off reproductive failure or death is not solved by the wave of hand proposal of "self-organization." When I tried this move with the wonderful Herman Daly, he said earnestly in a moment that I'll always remember, "I don't know what self-organization means." He left it at that.
After this loss of confidence in naturalism, it took me 5 more years to advance to Trinitarian Christianity, for which I take no intellectual or spiritual credit. My calling to Christianity was effected by God's initiative, and I may write about that another time. I've testified to it in my congregation.
[But back to the protein folding problem. Dawkins' discipline terms doubt like mine about the pre-biotic assembly of complex molecules a variety of Hoyle's Fallacy. Dawkins accordingly proposes a "thought experiment," the "Weasel Program" to give an explanation to the pre-biotic operation of chance AND SELECTION in the creation of complexity (though not the massively (emergently?) more complex structure and assembly linked kinematically with heritable.informatics, e.g. proto ribosomal RNA) He "demonstrates" the validity of this thought experiment with a computer program, the computer program selecting for the assembly of letters and spaces by selection and random copying errors the phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. This computer simulation leads to the evolution of the phrase in some relatively small number of digital iterations from a randomized start. The reliance on scale of so-called Hoyle (im)probabilities in Dawkin's interpretation is demonstrated a fallacy by this computer-aided thought exercise.
[I am not a professional biologist, but this demonstration is absurd. I won't argue the particulars about the homological features shared and unshared between a partially assembled, folded protein and its surrounding abiotic environmental matrix compared with the partial assembly of complex of binary digital bits situated in a biologically inert silicon matrix with selection operating abiotically. The physiochemical properties of a digital switch operating in human-designed hardware seem qualitatively vastly less meaningful and are not even remotely homological to the caustic and non-ecological (reducing atmospheric environment, etc.) properties of proto-biochemistry operating in a non-binary ontology. I am unconvinced by the thought experiment on first principles of "Hardware" regarding "abiotic selection" even before the computer is turned and connected to a power supply.]
But here's the main point, and I haven't seen it argued before, but I can't believe it has not been. When I was taught biology by the professors at the University of Michigan, they emphasized over and over that science in general, and biological evolution in particular, is "non-teleological." That is, there is no metaphysical form or biological ideal that evolution proceeds toward. (See especially Ernst Mayr (1988), Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Essay 3.) Yet, a computer software program evaluating the outcomes of artificial selection and random copying errors for partial matches according to a template in the software--selecting the computer runs for any partial matching of the template letters and starting a new iteration preserving (selecting for) the facts of any partial match of the template until a full match is produced--is an (inanimate) teleological system! The designed goal is acting to feedback on the inanimate intermediate steps! Teleological design characterizes both the hardware (likely) and the software (certainly) of this experiment! Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science (sic!), seems on the face of it to make a teleological system a demonstration of a scientific mechanism, even an evolutionary principle of the non-living matter!
"It takes a lot of brass," to quote Bill Clinton, to append the epithet "fallacy" to a person's last name (i.e. Hoyle) as Dawkins does in two of his books in concert with his misapplication of his own thought "experiment." This compound fallacy ought to have some culturally and philosophically admonitory label applied to it. Or, and I'm being serious, Dawkins' Weasel Program supports "teleological selection," in other words "pre-planned design," though of a more Platonic eidos than a J (Genesis 1) metaphysics. Dawkins was not the first to use the term "Hoyle's Fallacy." But I'm reasonably sure he has not earned the warrant to repeat it.
Dawkins, of course, is one of the public celebrity atheists. He has, according to this source [with links to Dawkins publications], flirted with the idea of empowering the state to prevent "child abuse" by religious-indoctrinating parents, so I admit viscerally and existentially disliking his politics. But if Dawkins gets science as both an enterprise and a research program of methodological, non-teleological naturalism confused at the pinnacle of his very public role as the heuristic and intellectual authority of the entire scientific venture, why would anyone pay any attention to his theological assertions, in which he has little or no training or collectively-attested accomplishment, little or no reflective spiritual sense of the numinous or metaphysical? He seems to me to have an abrasive confidence in his celebrity and a publishing contract. For me, Dawkins' Weasel Program "demonstration" reveals a cautionary tale about lack of philosophical discernment. I don't know that he can think "emergently" as the complexity theorists more recently have been proposing in biological models but are instead stuck in an outmoded and sterile reductionism. Not a great basis for a theological research program.
Dawkins thus proposes in simplistic fashion what some portion of "bright" naturalists seem to believe, that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other". Stephen Hawking also seems to believe this is a reasonable research program, and he argues that science disproves the existence of a creator god.
I cannot understand these acclaimed scientist's obdurate proposal of God/god as a scientific specimen. Science proceeds methodologically by atheistic investigation. It a priori rules out guided creation or Sovereign revelation or supernatural mechanisms as part of its method. I wish I could remember who first said this, but it seems to me irrefutable that "to use methodological atheism to prove metaphysical atheism is foolish." Science cannot methodologically prove the non-existence of God just as it (and I) cannot prove the supernatural. Scientists who claim to prove God's non-existence are, as Philip Johnson notes, "bluffing."
So, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science cannot give me a useful biotic demonstration of the evolution of hemoglobin's assembly non-teleologically much less a hint of an explanation of the pre-biotic biochemical origin of life. Much less the origin of self-consciousness and the sense of the numinous. He slips into teleology when carrying out a simplistic computer experiment (in the process seemingly satirizing what he cannot understand with his test phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL). I cannot theologically or scientifically or rationally prove the existence of a divine creator. I can testify to a consistent and loving force in my own life that accords with the testimonies of Hebrew and Christian Biblical authors and answers most of my questions and accounts for more of my experiential observations in a way that is more existentially profound, elegant, and ethical than alternative reductionist explanations. Dawkins does not have to accept my testimony. Whether it's because his rationality is "brighter" than mine, I'll let others make up their own minds.
For the record: I don't believe Intelligent Design is a science. I don't believe it should be taught in primary education, and in secondary education only as philosophy or theology. I don't believe intelligent design is methodologically compatible with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, yet nor do I believe arguments from design are inherently "anti-evolution." I do not hold with all intelligent design proposals, nor with all Darwinian hypotheses. However, even though I assert that the two research programs, while incompatible methodologically (and politically and culturally for many), they are for me complementary. I learn from both. I am a professing Christian and I accept the complementarity of Science and Faith and understand the reality of both imperfection in humanity and nature and of the goodness of God from both. To some, that makes me a liberal Christian and enemy to objective truth. To others, I am an expounder of intellectual bad faith because I believe in a god of their own creation which they've already rejected.
So I'll put it another way. Darwin was a pre-eminent scientific thinker. I believe that my theology of both creation and of the natural human urge to self-glorification and self-replication is broader and more nuanced by findings in Darwin's research program and evolutionary mechanics. Moreover, my theology is more pastoral and compassionate because of Darwin's advances in intellectual history. Darwin added perspective to the major theological problem posed by Malthus, the tragedy of nature when resources limit the prospects of offspring of animals. Gerd Thiessen in Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach [1984] proposes an impressive Biblical theology of the Darwinian condition to which humankind is subject and which Jesus submits to in his ministry and on the cross.
E.O. Wilson has changed his views. He recently notes that the relative ecological success of social species, including humans, include processes of "group selection." In the 1970s of my training, group selection was taboo for undergraduates to discuss. Dawkins today is scandalized that the taboo is broken in Wilson. But now, biological processes potentially can include moral mechanisms beyond just differential survival of individuals measured in the F1, kin selection, and gross reproductive and material resource amassing success. This biological evolution of groups is complementary with some of my theology of social action, intergenerational and trans-species care and responsibility, and economic justice. I am in some sense coming home to biology, but the biology of groups is also coming part way toward my morality if I understand the development of E. O. Wilson's thought.
I look forward to new discoveries and naturalist understandings. Nonetheless, I'll venture to say that in my struggles with understanding, the problem of suffering (theodicy) is less of a problem for my Christian faith than the problem of the origin of life leading to the reproducing cell seems to be for Dawkin's reductionist neo-Darwinism. I'd think, considering his endowed public role, it behooves him to work more intensively through the intellectual assumptions and problems of his discipline's research program and leave theological and philosophical research programs alone for the time being. Unless he wants to convert to the arguments from design, as teleology implies. Dawkins seems like a moth to a flame when it comes to boxing with gods, throwing stones at the moon, and reveling in the ring of celebrity.
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