God’s Uphill Struggle with Humanity (Part 2)

Gabrielle Giffords believes there is real promise inherent in slow, step-by-step work toward a hard-to-reach goal in spite of all difficulties. The former Arizona Representative, brain-damaged three years back by a gunman wounded her and killed six others, speaks of the “gritty, painful, frustrating” daily work of rehab. Such work that has only partially restored her mental and physical functioning.

The experience has become a metaphor, for her, of the struggle for gun control. Because she has “seen grit overcome paralysis” in her own therapy, and she has committed herself to building, day by day and heart by heart an “advocacy community” that can take on the uphill struggle with the powerful weapons manufacturers and gun lobby. She believes in the promise of the cause, and will “cede no ground to those who would convince us the path is too steep, or we too weak.” (1) 

A promise pledged or inherent?

For me, Giffords’ experience is an almost exact parallel to God’s uphill struggle with the human race for the full dawning of the rule of God “on earth as in heaven.” The promise of the kingdom is a paradoxical one, echoing the dual usage of the word “promise.” On the one hand a promise is a pledge one person makes to another, a commitment to give a gift or bestow a boon. On the other hand, “promise” speaks of the inherent potential of a person, proposal or cause: “she shows a lot of promise.” The kingdom is a promise in both senses, but conventional Christianity has tended toward the first usage: the kingdom is something God has promised, so God will deliver it in God’s good time.

Both biblically and existentially, the two usages are intertwined so that one can't be true without the other. Humanity, made in the image of God, shows great promise. God’s promise to us is that we can have the kingdom IF we "seek the things" that constitute the kingdom: peace, justice, compassion, right relationship, and openness to grace. The covenant people of God, both in and beyond church, synagogue and mosque form such an “advocacy community.” 

Evolution informs

The ways we were formed by evolution make clearer why, like Giffords’ struggle against paralysis, the way to the kingdom is such an uphill struggle. “The human brain is wired, first and foremost, with aggression for survival,” says brain and spirituality researcher Dr. Andrew Newman. “The wiring for social awareness and compassion are more recent developments.” (2) The prophetic vision of the possible kingdom dawns millenia later, after the violent conflict humans fall into so easily becomes intolerable to illumined souls. God’s struggle with our species for sanity and sanctity is a mighty uphill battle. God holds no magic wand to "make it all go away," but is in the struggle with us and has the scars to prove it.

Rather than despair that almost three millennia after the vision of the kingdom dawned our species is still capable of so much destruction, we need to marvel that we’ve come so far against such great odds.

Next:  God’s Uphill Struggle with Humanity (Part 3)
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1.  See her op-ed "The Lessons of Physical Therapy" at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/opinion/gabrielle-giffordss-call-for-persistence-on-gun-reform.html?_r=0

2.  Newman and Waldman run the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. See Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain. See http://www.andrewnewberg.com/

IV. "Twelve Days" Reflections IV: God’s Uphill Struggle (Part I)

My soul has dwelt among
those who hate peace.
I am for peace, 
but when I speak, 
they are for war. (1) 

The Magi, come from afar, kneel in homage before the Child. St. Matthew’s gospel sees as the fulfillment of the “Star Prophecy": There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel to smite injustice. (2)

As Persians, they may well have a special interest in a powerful Jewish leader, for the Jews live right on the dividing line between the Persian and Roman spheres of influence. The Magi, of the Zoroastrian priestly caste, may hope such a leader will deliver the whole Eastern Mediterranean once again into Persia’s hegemony.

Jewish resistance groups before, during and after the time of Jesus found great hope in the Star Prophecy. Marginalized, increasingly frustrated with the Establishment. they expected a definite and dramatic movement of God to usher in an era of great peace on earth, most especially for those with whom God is well pleased (3) as the angels tell the shepherds. Some expected miraculous rescue. 

And still we fight

Now, two thousand years later, Israel/Palestine sits uneasily on the same geo-political fault line between Persia and the West. A proxy war rages on its norther border in Syria between Saudi Arabia's Sunni Islam and Shi’ite Islam in Iran, modern day Persia. Iran has its eyes, once again, set on dominating the Middle East. The song of the angels goes unfulfilled still. 

As all those resistance groups, including the early followers of Jesus found, the great Promise of the Kingdom, or just Rule of God, did not descend miraculously from heaven.  Such disappointment as they endured at the failure of their hopes came, I believe, from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of biblical prophetic vision.

The prophets seldom predict; they warn, they challenge. They foresee what will happen IF people do not change their ways. What if prophetic visions of great promise contain the same challenge: this is what can happen IF you change your ways. The great era of peace can come, the vision says, when you seek the things that make for peace. (4)

The visions do not come so much from “above" as from “below,” that is, out of the heart and very guts of human yearning—visions of what must be if the human enterprise is to succeed. They arise from the seed of god-likeness planted in us all, sparked into life by visionaries who see clearly what must happen for human good. They reveal targets for our striving.

Resource rather than Rescuer

In this context, God becomes Resource rather than Rescuer; "Emmanuel" to work with us and through us to follow the Star toward the goal: peace-making, which cannot happen without justice-making and the building of compassionate community. Conflict between mutually loathing persons and powers seems, tragically, an "easier" way for the humans species. 

But the end of that road is death, especially with our current weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and biological. The prophetic vision of swords into plowshares (5)is the only feasible way forward for human survival. But the struggle uphill is hard, very hard. For us, and even, apparently, for God. 

Next: God’s Uphill Struggle with Humanity (Part 2) 
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1) Psalm 120:6-7
2) Numbers 24:17
3) Luke 2:14
4) Luke 19:42
5) Isaiah 2:4

Reflections During the 12 Days: III. Christmas as Paradox

My mother (as I shared in the first of these meditations during the 12 Days of Christmas) never made sure and certain promises. “Promise us,” we’d say; she’d respond with “If I can...I’ll try...” and, most commonly, “We’ll see.....depends.”  Frustrating. 

The Bible, by contrast, is full of promises: the promise of the Land, an everlasting covenant with Israel through Moses and David, the promise of Israel’s return from exile and restoration, and repeated promises of “justice and peace forever” The promises come from heaven, but on the ground frustrations abound: returning exiles experience danger and scarcity, “forever” ends up being “for a while,” and justice is too often delayed. Promise and frustration finally find their focus in Messianic expectation. 

Christian Christmas itself embodies the tension between these promises and the frustrations about fulfillment. The Babe born to be king of Israel—if we take the angel’s message at face value*—dies on a Roman cross. What can a believer in the Promising God make out of this?

Escaping the Dilemma

There are a couple of easy ways out of this dilemma. You can chose the traditional “spiritual not earthly Messiah” option. Jesus changes hearts, not nations, forgives sin and only “puts down the mighty from their seats” in a psycho-spiritual way. The Messianic expectation used earthly metaphors to talk about interior realities.

Or you can choose the more modern way out: the “real” Jesus was a profound teacher who didn’t pretend to Messianic stature. The burning Messianic promise at the center of the New Testament arises from the mistaken assumptions of early disciples and later story-crafters.

I’d rather live in the discomfort of the paradox: the ever-tantalizing promise of God’s rule of justice, mercy, love, and “peace on earth” and the ever-recurrent reality of injustice, hard-heartedness, hatred, conflict that, again and again, frustrates its fulfillment. Even the biblical “minimalists” who see the Messianic claims as a distortion laid on Jesus believe his proclamation “The kingdom of God is at hand” comes from his own mouth.

Promise or Vision?

Which lands us squarely in what I call the paradox of messianic faith that is at the heart of Christianity: a just God who presides over an unjust world, yet promises the triumph of justice. From Job’s dung-hill to the martyrs under the heavenly altar the cry goes out, “How long, O Lord; how long?”

But what if the Promise actually comes to us as a vision of the possible from the heart of a God who really, really, wants to save humankind? Save us from our ominous self-destructive capacities. Save us and the planet from the destruction we bring to it, and, ultimately upon ourselves. What if the "promise" is a seed of yearning and hope planted in our very nature? As a lure to activate our own search for the "things that make for peace?"**

What if Jesus’ challenge to change our ways and believe are what this not-quite-a-promise vision depends on? What if humanity's only hope is rising to the challenge of this vision?

Next: God’s Uphill Struggle With Humanity

* Luke 1:32-33:  "...and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end."

** Luke 9:42

Reflections for the 12 Days: Christmas as Problem

“The Holidays,” and most especially Christmas, pose a problem to a great number of people. The reasons are varied: memory of lost loved ones, the scars of unhappy family Christmases past, and, perhaps most widespread, the vaguer sense of never being able to get with the alleged and elusive “spirit” of the season.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t belong to the “bah, humbug” crowd. I really love Christmas. But it’s simply true that Christmas always threatens to disappoint.

How could it not, granted the excessive hype of the cultural celebration? Mothers trying to create the “perfect” Christmas for their children; husbands looking for the gift for their wives that will unlock that special smile from the heart; children expecting that every Christmas will be even better than the last; the perils of family gatherings.

And so, “Blue Christmas” services have sprung up like mini-oases in the bleak mid-winter for those afraid of too much exposure to songs celebrating “the most wonderful time of the year.” 

Challenges of the Messianic Promise

The problem goes deeper than the Santa-expectations and the tenuous “magic” of the holidays straight into the heart of the Christian story of Jesus’ birth. After all, he was “born to save us from our sins” and sin still abounds mightily. The angel told Mary that he would “sit on the throne of his father David and rule over the house of Israel forever,” which he may well do in heaven, but on the plane of earthly history his life ended on a Roman cross. ‘

The early community's faith, expressed in the Christmas story, was faced the first and second generations with the problem of unfulfilled promise. Where is the promise of his coming?*  they asked—that Coming that would fulfill the promises of the angels, the promises the original disciples had imagined would be fulfilled in Jesus’ own earthly triumph over sin and injustice. As the carol says of the angel’s song: 

   But with the woes of sin and strife/ The world has suffered long;
   Beneath the angel-song have rolled/ Two thousand years of wrong**

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a believer. I really love the Christmas stories. But a proclamation of these stories, and of the gospel itself, in forms too cheerfully magical can lead people to great disappointment. Yes, “Jesus saves,” but miraculous transformations are few and far between. Yes, Jesus is “Lord of all the earth” in the upbeat hymn, but millions of Syrian refugees shiver in the cold this Christmas, and people in the Central African Republic die in droves violently every day.

Whatever else it is, neither the gospel nor the Way of Jesus are a panacea for the world Jesus came to save. If we take the Proclamation of the Angels seriously, we must admit that Christmas is not only promise and problem, but also paradox.

Next: Christmas as Paradox
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*   2 Peter 3:4
** "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear"by The Rev. Edmund Sears, 1849

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas: First Day

First Day: Christmas as Promise

One of my godson’s kids wrote Santa with a confession and a hope: even though she had been somewhat naughty this year (her younger brother’s fault, entirely), she very much wanted the list of toys attached. Her tone was one of confident trust that Santa would understand her frank confession and fulfill his promise of largesse to children who are Nice. 

Macy’s big holiday advertising campaign centers on “a million reasons to believe.”  Believe in what? Any or all of the following: Savior, Santa, peace, goodwill, the Christmas (or Holiday) spirit. Believe in the manifold promises of the season. 
 
Christmas, even in its secular “Holiday” forms, is all about promises. The promise of a Savior. The promise that St. Nick, Kinderklaus, Santa will come through again to grant wishes.  The promise of “peace, good will toward men.” The promise that if we’re really in the right mood we can tune in to the “spirit” of the season.

Two Ancient Promises

Fair enough, to give the Season its due, for this mood of believing in promises is rooted in two ancient promises. First, the pledge of a Savior “thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins . . . and his kingdom will have no end” which gave birth to the Christian celebration. Second, the even older Solstice promise, in the dark of the year, of the return of light and warmth as the days lengthen, which gave birth to the European Winterfest (Solstice, Yule, Saturnalia) in which Christmas itself is nested.

My mother declined to make any absolute promises to us as children, unlike her mother-in-law who promised much and fulfilled, well, some. In reality, our lives do slowly accumulate unfilled promises, small and great. More and more the intensity of the Holiday Season as well as Christmas for Christians seems to me to arise out of our yearning for the fulfillment of promises in the midst of a world where so many of them are either broken or turn out to be ephemeral.

“Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.”  We yearn.
“Peace on earth, and mercy mild.”  We hope.
“When....shall come the age of gold.”  We want so much to believe.

Santa often comes through for kids, so the promise often works. Believing the Yuletide promise also comes easily, so long as there is food and fuel enough to make it alive until the earth springs green again. The promise of Savior and Peaceable Kingdom are a bigger stretch, granted the state of the world and the human soul. Yet the message of the angels is not just a promise, but a challenge: believe. 

On this the fate of the world may well depend.   

Next: Christmas as Problem

Secession, by Another Name

South Carolina just made the political crisis over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) crystal clear: this is Secession by another name. Their State House of Representatives proposes making any step to implement the Act a punishable crime. This goes along with a new far-right campaign to label ACA itself "criminal."

“Secession,” this time around, is a rebellious refusal to abide by the fundamental rules of the Republic. South Carolina, the Tea Party Caucus, and, for the moment, the Congressional GOP leadership don't want to leave the Union literally. They simply refuse to honor the Constitution’s method of creating and implementing law. Congress passed ACA; the Supreme Court upheld it; it is the law of the land. Democracy in the U.S. means that the majority rules.

If you don't like this, you work to change the mind of the majority, and get legislators elected who represent you. If they gain majority power in Congress, you may get to change the law. Neither States nor political parties get to pick and choose which laws they will honor. That’s the way the United States work.

Unless people secede from the social contract, and secede from honoring the Constitutional set-up.

Replaying an old tape

This stubborn refusal to recognize the validity of a Federal law thrives particularly in the South, but don’t imagine the secession impulse has ever been limited to the South. In the early Republic, New England muttered threats to secede more than once in response to the Southern slavocracy’s demands. North and South struggled to see whose vision of the American future would prevail. Now GOP controlled states in other parts of the country, both west and north, play virtual secession to one degree or another. They bandy about the word itself with varying degrees of seriousness. 

We’ve been here before; the tactics are familiar: states reject any Federal law that doesn’t suit them. State’s Rights trump Federal authority.  So great was the split over slavery it took a war to decide which view would prevail. If you don’t like “secession,” call it “insurrection.” Whatever you call it, it ain’t politics as usual.

No shooting war is at hand. The tactic now is refusal to govern. This is not the usual "gridlock." It is a Constitutional crisis not unlike the one in 1860-61. Objections to the Affordable Care Act cloak the real issue: the authority of Federal institutions—and, alas, which man is President. Obama is the new Lincoln, a President one sector of the country refuses to tolerate.

But, one might say, these folks simply demand the right to uphold their conscience-driven convictions. That was, of course, exactly the point of the secessionist movement of 1860-61 that led to what the rebels called "The War of Northern Aggression."

In any case, the future of the Republic hangs on how this crisis is resolved.

Syria, Sarin and Moral Indignation

Moral indignation seems to be everywhere as we consider wading (further) into the Syrian civil war.

The Left fulminates over Obama-Peace-Laureate proposing war; the Administration inveighs against chemical weapons; the Tea Party finds anything Obama says or does outrageous; and the pundits practice indignation over either (choose one):  a) America’s growing isolationist mood and indifference to innocent suffering; b) America’s eagerness to be the world’s policeman

As a sure sign of feeling morally right, indignation allows us to build up energy for a fight with those we know are morally wrong, those other guys who don’t see things as clearly as we do. When we’re in fight mode we can enjoy the really great feeling of “moral clarity,” in which all the ambiguities resolve themselves into crystal-sharp black and white. The Secretary of State’s moral outrage index over the death of innocents knows no bounds as he leads the drummers ramping us up toward our “limited, targeted” bombing. 

Ignoring Moral Complexity

To be honest, I don’t know what the wisest course might be for Superpower America to take, so this blog isn’t about any “right” way to go. Bombing or no bombing, tragic things will happen; either way promises “innocent deaths.” But little, if any, moral clarity seems apparent. Consider:

+    Chemical killing outrages, but “ordinary” killing only saddens, it would seem. Assad is a monster, chemical weapons abominable, but our use of Agent Orange, phosphorus bombs, and depleted uranium bombshells in war doesn’t qualify as morally out-of-bounds.

+    The Assad regime provides the main bulwark of protection not only for the Shi’ite Alawites, but for the Christians of Syria. But the democracy we imagine will be better for all will make both minorities lethally vulnerable to Sunni.

+    All the talk of innocent deaths and “red lines” against chemical weapons (deliberately?) leaves out vital geo-political factors that  make the Syrian conflict a "proxy" war for a regional Sunni/ Shi'ite struggle. This pits Sunni Arabia and the Iraqi Sunnis against Shi'ite Iran, the Iraqi Shi'ites, and the ruling Shi'ia Alawites of Syria. The Saudis and the Iranians struggle over who will dominate the whole region, and deliver oil and  natural gas to the world as well—a matter of no little concern to the U.S.

Toward a Humbler Wisdom

To cite all this is to spoil the excitement of moral indignation, of course. An equal opportunity employer, moral outrage brings pleasure to Left, Right, and Center. The danger, however, is what the Greeks called hubris, overweening pride and self-justifying zeal, whether if be the zeal of the pacifist who would keep us out of war and let the other guys go on killing each other, or of the hawk who would ride in on a white horse to save the innocent.  

I’m certainly not any friend of the Assad regime. The prospect of chemical warfare really frightens. So why muddy the waters with these musings and misgivings?

Perhaps it's because in situations so complex and tragic as this, our only choices are between greater and lesser evils. To realize this clearly might foster humbler and wiser, albeit less morally exciting, decisions.