How Can We Keep Going?

I am beginning to wonder how we can possibly keep going in this world.  Whether anything is worth it.  Whether it makes any sense to care anymore.  Watching a Simon and Garfunkle special on PBS recently reminded me of how messed up the world was back in the 1960s, the decade in which I came of age.  It really was.  The insanity of Vietnam.  The insanity of racial discrimination.  So many other insanities.  Opposition to the movement for the rights of migrant workers.  Opposition to the rights of women.  Old white men in Washington making insane decisions and a majority of American voters electing the deeply flawed Richard Nixon president in a year we remember as the epitome of the Sixties, the decade that was supposed to change everything.  Change everything?  Hardly.  We young people wanted to change the world, but the country elected Richard Nixon.  We should have known then that change wasn't going to happen.  It took a lot longer than that for us to figure it out.

And today?  Not significantly better.  An insane war in Afghanistan and nearly a billion dollars spent to build a fortress that masquerades as an embassy in Baghdad, a city we have supposedly liberated and pacified.  Or at least that's what they tell us our illegal war of aggression against Iraq accomplished.  Mad politicians on the right lying to the people by telling them government is their enemy when in fact the wealthy individuals and corporations that fund those politicians’ campaigns are the people’s real enemies.  Mad politicians that the corporate media treat as legitimate alternatives for the American voter denying the science of global warming, denying the equal rights of gay and lesbian people, denying the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies.  Major politicians on the right denying the science of evolution because of an utterly untenable biblical literalism.  And the Democrats?  Not significantly better.  A president who promised change but who is so timid and/or so naïve that he thinks he can get cooperation out of congressional Republicans who only want to destroy him.  Who pursues military policies that are indistinguishable from those of the war criminal George W. Bush.  After all, he retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense.  We should have known. 

One out of six Americans living in poverty—and that with an artificially low definition of poverty adopted to keep the statistics from looking as bad as things really are.  Unemployment actually so much worse than the official statistics indicate.  The social safety net, such as it ever was, being shredded so that rich people don’t have to pay anything close to a fair share of the cost maintaining a decent society.  A governor who is running for President claiming a job creation miracle in his state when the truth is that almost all of the jobs he talks about don’t pay a living wage and much of what was accomplished was done with federal stimulus dollars that this governor says should never have been spent and never will be spent again if he has anything to say about it. (And that same governor saying with a straight face that he will always be for life when as of this writing he has presided over 234 executions during his time as governor.)

Churches endorsing American militarism.  No politician of any note who is even raising a question about why we spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.  An increasing militarization of American life.  A culture that calls everyone who wears an American military uniform a hero just because he or she wears that uniform, thereby making it all the more difficult to question the way the powers use the military.  Violent popular entertainment in the movies and video games that makes violence seem normative and redemptive.  A culture in which the one sure thing a president can do to drive up his favorability ratings is to go to war.  A culture in which even supposedly progressive Christian declarations like the Phoenix Affirmations, the 8 Points of the Center for Progressive Christianity, and my own denomination’s declaration on being a “just peace church” that refuse to claim nonviolence as a core value.

Then there’s the environmental degradation to which we all contribute.  And the politicians who oppose meaningful environmental regulation because it might cost their wealthy patrons at whose beck and call they serve some money.  They lie to the people saying that environmental regulation will cost jobs, and even our Democratic President gives in.  And all the while the truth is that there is great potential for job creation and economic renewal in creating and building the technologies of environmental cleanup and clean energy.

And so much more madness.  So much every day that you can’t even keep track of it.  So much that it overwhelms.  So much that sometimes I cry out Why aren’t we out in the streets in our tens of millions demanding some sanity?  But I’m not out in the street demanding some sanity, so who am I to blame others?  It seems impossible not to feel hopeless.  Not to feel that there is truly nothing that can be done.  The money is too strong.  The anti-intellecttualism and political ignorance and naiveté of the American people are too strong.

Yes, there are some voices of reason and decency.  Bernie Sanders.  Jim Hightower.  Keith Olbermann.  Thom Hartmann.  Bill Moyers.  Walter Wink.  John Dominic Crossan.  You may know of others.  Some people speak the truth, but not many.  Not enough, but some.  Most of the time they’re whistling into the wind.  Few hear.  Fewer listen.  Perhaps their true significance is that when history looks back on these times they will see that not everyone was mad.  Some saw clearly.  Not many, but some.
And yes, some things have gotten better.  Racial discrimination is now illegal everywhere in our country, although of course that doesn't mean it is no longer part of our reality.  Many people are more environmentally aware than we used to be.  Some states, not many but a few, recognize the equal rights and dignity of same gender couples by allowing them to marry, and more states have included sexual orientation and perhaps even gender identity in their anti-discrimination laws.  Some things have gotten better, but not enough things have gotten enough better to counter all of the glaring shortcomings in our reality today.

Yes, I know that the picture of American reality today that I paint is bleak.  It’s discouraging.  It’s even depressing.  I don’t see, however, how anyone can demonstrate that anything I have said about our current reality is untrue.  There’s a saying that’s been going around for years.  I’ve seen it on bumper stickers and elsewhere.  It’s become a bit trite, but it’s still true.  "If you aren’t completely appalled you haven’t been paying attention."  Our current reality simply is that bleak.

And it is so hard to keep going.  It is so hard to keep preaching the Gospel.  It is so hard to keep putting up blog posts that so few people read.  To write another book when so pitifully few have read the first one.  It all seems so pointless.  Some days I am tempted to stop paying attention, to retreat into a little world of work, family, and personal acquaintances.  Sometimes I get why the followers of monastic spiritual paths withdraw from the world.  Sometimes I get it why people in the Soviet Union, with which I have considerable familiarity, considered matters of state to be none of their business since they had no way to influence them.  Sometimes I try to be satisfied going small, caring only about those who cross my path in life immediately, in person. 

I try to be satisfied with small concerns, but so far I haven’t managed it.  You see, there’s a problem with narrowing the realm of our concern to those in our immediate sphere.  The problem is God.  The problem is God, and God can be very annoying because God won’t let us give up on the world, as messed up as it is and as hopeless as it seems.  God has this crazy idea that we’re all prophets.  Moses said “would that all of God’s people were prophets.”  Bruce Chilton tells us that the Hebrew original that is translated that way actually means that all of God’s people are prophets.  At the very least we have to admit that God calls all of us to be prophets.

OK, we’re all called to be prophets; but what is a prophet?  The word prophet is so often taken to mean someone who can foretell the future.  That, however, is not what prophet means in the Bible.  Yes, the prophets of ancient Israel talked about what would happen if the rulers of the Hebrew kingdoms of their time didn’t hear and heed the word of God; but predicting the future wasn’t what they were primarily about.  What they were primarily about was proclaiming that word of God and demanding that the rulers of their time hear and heed it.  Mostly what the prophets of ancient Israel did was demand justice from the rulers, demand that the ruling elites of their societies treat the poor and the marginalized justly.  Demand that those with the means to do so take care of those who are in need.  Their usual way of putting it was to demand justice for the widow, the orphan, and the alien in their midst.  Those were the most vulnerable people in those societies, and they were the ones for whom the prophets demanded justice.

Jesus was a prophet.  Mostly what he was about as an historical matter was reviving the ancient Hebrew prophetic tradition that had gotten displaced by the Pharisees’ focus on purity and sacrificial worship as the way of faith.  He too demanded justice, meaning by justice what the ancient prophets had meant.  Not due process.  Not that all get what they deserve in the eyes of the world.  Rather, that everyone receive enough to live on.  That everyone be treated as a beloved child of God.  To that ancient Hebrew prophetic message Jesus added a call to radical nonviolence.  To the love of enemies.  To active, creative, assertive but always nonviolent resistance to evil. 

God calls us all to be prophets, and the prophetic message that God calls us to proclaim is the prophetic message of Jesus.  Not to proclaim that Jesus is some sort of magic get out of jail free card with regard to sin, although there is a sense in which he is that.  That message is not, however, what Jesus proclaimed, the Gospel of John seemingly at least to the contrary notwithstanding.  He proclaimed the Kingdom of God.  That was the phrase he used to sum up the prophetic message he came to deliver.  There are many aspects of the Kingdom, but chief among them are distributive justice and nonviolence.  Those things God calls us to proclaim just as Jesus did.

And we’d so much rather not.  It seems so pointless.  The message seems to have so little effect in the world.  It’s so hard to find ways to speak that can reach anyone.  Beyond that, being a prophet is dangerous.  Jesus called Jerusalem the city that kills the prophets, and it’s not just Jerusalem.  It’s the world, all of it.  Even when the world doesn’t kill a prophet it can turn on the prophet with a vengeance.  Certainly it is true in our country that nothing will get you in trouble faster than speaking the truth.  In my line of work we hear time and time again of pastors who lost their pulpits because they spoke the truth about justice and peace more than their congregations could stand.  No politician can speak the truth about how America acts in the world or about the gross inadequacy of our social security programs and have much of a hope of reelection.  No politician can call on voters to be more concerned with what is good for the poor than with what is good for themselves and have much of a hope of reelection.  Being a prophet seems mostly like a really good way to become very unpopular at best and dead at worst.  In my line of work it can be a really good way to get yourself fired.

We want to do what the biblical prophets so often did when they discerned a call from God.  We want to say no.  We want to board a ship for Tarshish as we flee a call to go to Nineveh, that great city.  But when we do we’ve got the same problem Jonah had.  We’ve got God, and God doesn’t give up as easily as we do.  Jonah ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit.  That’s unlikely to happen to us, at least not literally.  Still, we know what God wants.  God wants us to go to Nineveh.  God wants us to be prophets, and God isn’t going to stop calling us to be prophets.

So what are we to do?  Is there in all of these considerations an answer to the question the title of this essay poses, the question of how we can keep going?  I think that there is, although it’s not an easy answer.  The answer is that for all of our call to be prophets it isn’t up to us to transform the world.  At least, it isn’t up to us to transform the world all by ourselves.  A prophet realizes that God calls us to the work of transformation, but the prophet also knows that the world belongs to God not to us.  Our call is to work, yes; but we do not work alone.  We are God’s partners in the work of transformation, and that partnership makes all the difference.  It makes all the difference because we can work while leaving outcomes to God, something that can substantially reduce our stress and frustration..  It makes all the difference because when we feel hopeless, when we feel helpless, when we start to burn out we can turn to God in prayer and worship and find renewal.  We can find strength.  We can find hope in God when we can find none in the world.  So how can we keep going?  The answer is the same as the problem we have when we want to quit.  The problem is God, and the answer is God.  That’s how we can keep going.  It’s the only possible answer.  There is no answer to be found in the world, except to the extent that we can find God in the world.  God is the answer.  God is how we can keep going.