On Prayer

This is the sermon I gave on Sunday, July 24, 2016.

On Prayer

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 24, 2016

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I have a confession to make. Now, I know that some preachers believe that a pastor should never admit that he doesn’t know something, or that he struggles with something, or that he ever does anything wrong, especially not in a sermon. Well, I actually think that honesty is the better policy, so I have a confession to make. I struggle with prayer. I mean, I struggle with the common notion that the reason we should pray to God is so that God will do something we want God to do. I’ve heard of people who insist that that is true. This is second hand hearsay, but I know a woman who says she has a friend who swears that every time she’s in downtown Seattle looking for on-street parking, and she prays to God for an open parking place, she finds one. Now, I don’t go to downtown Seattle nearly as often as I used to, but I know that finding on-street parking there is essentially impossible. I don’t even bother looking for it. But this women is convinced that when she asks God to find her a parking space, she finds one. I have so many problems with that notion that I hardly know where to start to list them. Is God really concerned about something as trivial as this woman finding on-street parking so she doesn’t have to pay a parking garage? I sure don’t think so. More importantly, is that really how prayer works? Ask God for something—anything—and you’ll get it? Apparently a lot of people think so.

A lot of people think so, and it’s not hard for them to quote Scripture verses that seem to support their belief. We heard some of those verses just now. In our passage this morning from Luke Jesus says “Ask and it will be given to you.” And “everyone who asks receives.” And “seek and you will find.” Sure sounds like Jesus is saying “sure. Just ask God for it. For anything, and God will have nothing better to do than give it to you.” You need a parking place? Sure. God is the cosmic parking lot attendant. You need to pass that exam in your college course? Sure. Don’t bother learning the material, God will essentially take the test for you. Of course, sometimes our requests to God are more serious than that. You need a loved one to recover from a severe illness? “Sure,” God says, “I’m the cosmic physician who can cure all illnesses.” That’s what these verses sound like, isn’t it? Ask, and whatever you ask for will be given to you. ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find.” Case closed, right?

Well, some of you know me well enough by now to know that I don’t think the case is closed. If it were, I probably wouldn’t be preaching on it this morning. I don’t think the case is closed for a couple of reasons. First of all, I just don’t think life works like that. I think that human experience just doesn’t support that simplistic a reading of these lines. We humans just don’t get everything we ask God for. I could ask God to deliver a Rolls Royce to my driveway by the time I get home today, and there certainly will be no Rolls Royce in my driveway when I get there. On a more serious note, I prayed that my first wife would recover from breast cancer. She didn’t. She died of it fourteen years ago next Sunday. I suspect that many of you have spoken or thought similar prayers for loved ones who passed away. Some Fundamentalist preachers might tell us that we just didn’t pray hard enough or long enough. Well, sorry. That’s not how it works. Thinking that that’s how prayer works shifts the blame for things for which we pray that don’t happen onto us when we have absolutely no control over the situation. Thinking that that’s how prayer works, that that’s how God works, destroys faith. It destroys faith because that isn’t how prayer works, and it isn’t how God works. My first big problem with believing that all we have to do to receive anything at all is to ask God for it is that life doesn’t work that way and God doesn’t work that way. God simply is not a cosmic Santa Claus.

Beyond that, I don’t think that our Gospel verses this morning actually say that prayer works that way. It sure sounds like they say that, at least upon first reading or hearing, but I don’t think they say that for a couple of reasons. First, these verses are awfully vague. “Ask and it will be given you.” What will be given me? We can read into the verse that the thing I asked for will be given me, but the verse doesn’t actually say that. In that sentence the pronoun “it” has no referent. It doesn’t refer back to anything. Then we have “Seek and you will find.” Seek what? Anything? Find what? Precisely what you’re seeking? I guess we can read that into these lines too, but they don’t actually say that. I think maybe Jesus was playing a bit of trick on us here. He wanted us to think that that’s what he’s saying when he really isn’t.

Which brings us to the second and more important reason why I don’t think these verses actually say that God will give us whatever we ask for. There are hints in them that God actually gives us something else. First, in the parable of the obnoxious neighbor who won’t stop bothering his neighbor in the middle of the night, Jesus doesn’t say that the annoyed one will give the annoying one whatever he is asking for. He says that the annoyed one will “give him as much as he needs.” As much as he needs. That certainly isn’t necessarily the same as what the persistent neighbor is asking for. Maybe he’s asking for a lot more than he needs. Maybe he’s asking for less than he needs. Maybe he’s asking for something other than what he really needs. Jesus says the neighbor who doesn’t want to get up and give him anything will in the end give him “as much as he needs.” Maybe that’s how God works. We get we need, not necessarily what we’re asking for.

Yet I think there’s a more profound truth in these lines than that. See, all of these lines lead up to a climax at the end. This passage on prayer ends with Jesus saying “how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” Not “give whatever she’s asking for to one who asks him.” No, not that at all, but rather “give the Holy Spirit” to those who ask. In the way that these verses end lies the truth about prayer, I think. What we get what we really need. When we pray we receive the Holy Spirit. In other words, we get a strengthened awareness of the presence of God in our lives. I understand these verses to be saying seek the presence of God in your life through prayer, and you will find it. Ask for God to send the Holy Spirit into your life to comfort, guide, and challenge you, and you will receive it. Knock to have door opened so that you can enter into life in the Holy Spirit, and the door will be opened.

See, God knows what we really need in our lives. It’s not to find on-street parking in downtown Seattle, as much as we might want to find on-street parking in downtown Seattle. It’s not to receive any material thing. It’s not even to recover from illness and avoid death, for God knows that we all die and return home to God sooner or later. No, what God knows we need is God’s loving, sustaining, inspiring presence in our lives. What we need more than anything is to live in intimate connection and familiarity with God. It is really to know God present with us offering all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit as we do whatever it is we do, as we face whatever it is that we must face. That’s what prayer gives us. Prayer is the primary way in which we come to know God and God’s presence in the world and in our lives.

There are lots of kinds of prayer. They don’t all work equally well for everyone. One way may work well for one person and another way for another person. Here in our worship we usually do three different kinds of prayer. We offer our prayers for ourselves, others, and God’s world. That’s called intercessory prayer. We recite the Lord’s prayer. That’s a kind of vocal prayer that connects us with the ancient Christian tradition and with Jesus Christ. And we sit, however briefly, in silence. In silence we listen for God. In silence we wait for the stirrings of the Spirit. I personally think that silence is the most profound prayer of all, but each of us needs to find the kind of prayer that works for us. If a kind of prayer really works for you it really doesn’t matter what kind of prayer it is. However you pray, don’t expect miracles, at least not any earthly kind of miracle. Expect the miracle of God’s loving, forgiving, sustaining presence with you in everything you do and everything you say. That’s what prayer can give us. That in the end is the power of prayer, the power to connect us with our loving, forgiving, sustaining, and challenging God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Conclusion to a book about Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev

Back in 1976 and 1977 I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. He was a tutor of the last two tsars on civil law. More importantly, he was Over Procurator of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905. He has the reputation of having been the dark power behind the Russian throne during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II. I have recently undertaken the task of turning that old dissertation into a book that I intend to have published or to self-publish. Here, for anyone who's interested, is the concluding section of that book.

Some Concluding Remarks

(c)Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2016. All rights reserved.

What has our study of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev revealed? Most importantly it has revealed that he had a well-developed political ideology that we can characterize as both conservative and populist. He was a conservative in the spirit of Edmund Burke. He apparently never read Burke, or at least he left no direct evidence that he did. He was however familiar with the writings of Thomas Carlyle, and it was precisely the Burkean elements in Carlyle’s thought that appealed to him. Burke’s principles of prejudice and prescription were the essential elements of Pobedonostsev’s ideology. The Burkean notion of prescription is seen in Pobedonostsev’s historicism. For Pobedonostsev as for Burke institutions were legitimized only by history. Political and social institutions which had developed through history, he believed, corresponded to the needs of a given country as no institution created on the basis of political theories every could. In Russia’s case the two most important institutions created and legitimized by history were the autocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church. Together they had made Russia strong. Pobedonostsev was convinced that Russia’s continued greatness depended upon their preservation into the future essentially unchanged from what they had been in the past.

Pobedonostsev’s historicism was influenced by the school of German legal historicism founded by Savigny. Pobedonostsev was trained as a lawyer. He became a widely respected legal scholar. Savigny’s historicism was the dominant tendency in European legal literature when Pobedonostsev graduated from the Academy of Jurisprudence in 1846, and he clearly accepted the fundamental assumptions of Savigny’s approach to law. Because the German historicists were familiar with Burke, their work reinforced Pobedonostsev’s commitment to the Burkean principles he found in English literature.

Burke’s idea of prejudice was even more central to Pobedonostsev’s thought than was Burke’s other major idea, the idea of prescription. Prejudice for Burke meant a rejection of abstract reason and a reliance on ideas and loyalties accepted largely uncritically simply because they were there. Pobedonostsev rejected abstract reason in terms virtually identical to Burke’s, although Pobedonostsev did not make Burke’s distinction between abstract and political reason. Pobedonostsev denied the validity of all conclusions arrived at logically beginning with general principles. In the place of this approach he put a reliance on what he claimed were the ideas and loyalties of the mass of the Russian people, the narod. The narod, he said, had a sure guide to knowledge and action in its reliance on faith and immediate impression. Because the narod, he believed, rejected the Western notion of reason and abstract rights based on reason it remained true to Russian beliefs and customs. It also retained its traditional fidelity to the two primary institutions of Russian life, autocracy and Orthodoxy.

Pobedonostsev was, then, a conservative in the standard Western sense of that term. He was also a consistent populist. We have seen that a populist, as that term was originally understood in Russia, was one who desired to subordinate his or her own wishes to those of the narod and to work with the narod to attain goals that the narod defined for itself. Pobedonostsev fits that definition quite well, although it does seem that he fits it because he attributed goals that he actually defined himself to the narod as goals it had defined itself. He was not entirely naïve about the Russian narod. He knew full well that most of its members were illiterate. He knew that far too many of them drank far too much vodka and other spirits. Still, he believed in the basic goodness of the narod, and he desired that the autocratic government base its strength directly on the narod and on what he insisted was the narod’s reliable loyalty to the regime. He rejected the claims of the liberal intelligentsia to speak for the narod and its claim of the right to formulate policies for it. He seems, however, not to have been bothered by the reality that he was a member of the conservative intelligentsia who claimed to speak for the narod and claimed the right to formulate policies for it. In other words, he did precisely what he denied his opponents the right to do. Still, he was a populist in the technical, etymological meaning of that word.

One of the most important aspects of Pobedonostsev’s thought was its consistency from the beginning to the end of his career. Pobedonostsev was never a liberal despite the fact that he has often been considered by observers to have been one. In his first important published work, the article “On Reform in Civil Judicial Procedure,” which appeared in 1859, the fundamental elements of his ideology were already apparent. In his work on the judicial reform of 1864 he consistently stressed that any reform had to be based on the needs and desires of the Russian narod, not on abstract juridical theory. He stressed the historically conditioned nature of judicial institutions and rejected any effort to transplant institutions from one society to another. These are the basic principles of his fully developed conservatism. He held those principles from the time of his first significant publication in 1859 to his death in 1907.

It is not surprising that even in 1859 Pobedonostsev was a consistent conservative. He was in many respects a product of the reign of Nicholas I, the reactionary tsar who came to the throne in 1825 putting down the revolt of the Decembrists, a group of nobles and military offices who undertook essentially a coup d’état as Nicholas I came to the throne. His father was a conservative nationalist. The education he received at the Academy of Jurisprudence was designed to produce competent and loyal servants of the autocracy. Pobedonostsev was not exposed to the lively and often radical intellectual atmosphere that so significantly influenced some of his contemporaries in Moscow in the 1840’s. He was not the sort of person attracted to fashionable intellectual doctrines and heated debates. He was not part of the debate between the Westerners and the Slavophiles, and he was untouched by Russian Hegelianism. His training and personality helped make him a supporter rather than an opponent of autocracy.

There are some significant parallels between Pobedonostsev’s thought and the doctrine of Official Nationality that was prevalent under Nicholas I. Official Nationality stressed Orthodoxy, autocracy, and Russian nationality, as did Pobedonostsev. Nicholas I and his supporters believed in the uniqueness of Russian institutions, as did Pobedonostsev. It seems probable that he was influenced at least in a general way by the atmosphere of Official Nationality in which he grew up. We have seen that much of the legislation he initiated as Over Procurator of the Holy Synod was designed to return to the status quo under Nicholas I before the reforms of Alexander II. He seems to have seen the years before 1855, the year in which Nicholas I died and Alexander II came to the throne, as in many respects a golden age for Russia. It is not possible, however, to establish any direct influence on him of any specific writers of that era. He never referred to Uvarov or any other apologist for Nicholas I as a source of his ideas. The sources for his specific ideas appear to have Western rather than Russian, although sources on his development before 1859 are lacking. Official Nationality was probably important for Pobedonostsev, but it is impossible to establish specific influences on him from that era.

The question of Pobedonostsev’s relationship to the Slavophiles is complex. They had similar conceptions of the nature of the Russian narod, although many of the Slavophiles were probably more guilty of romanticizing the narod than Pobedonostsev was. Yet Pobedonostsev was by no means a Slavophile. His conception of Russian history was very different from theirs. He did not seek a return to Russia’s pre-Petrine past. After all, he spent twenty-five years in a governmental and ecclesiastical position that Peter the Great had created. He did not believe that Peter’s reforms had broken the moral bond tying the narod to the tsar like many of the Slavophiles did. His conception of Russian Orthodoxy did not include the notion of sobornost’ that was so important to such Slavophiles as Khomiakov.[1] Despite his denunciation of Alexander II, the structure of the Russian state in the nineteenth century was much more satisfactory to him than it was to the Slavophiles. He differed from many of the Slavophiles in temperament too. He frequently criticized his friend Ivan Aksakov for his intemperate attacks on the government. Slavophile thinking was clearly not an important source of Pobedonostsev’s ideas.

We have seen how Pobedonostsev’s career in public service and his personality were related in many ways to his ideology. His life touched upon most of the significant events in the history of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. He first became active in public affairs during the period of intense discussion and debate about the most fundamental problems of Russian life that preceded the introduction of the Great Reforms of the 1860’s. He witnessed the implementation of those reforms and the period of indecision and doubt that followed them in the 1870’s. He lived through and commented on the “crisis of autocracy” at the end of that decade. His critique of the rise of revolutionary terrorism, a critique based on the fundamental assumptions of his ideology, led him to dismiss the significant threat it appeared to pose, blaming Russia’s problems instead on the weakness and vacillation he perceived in the government’s policies. The ultimate victory of the revolutionaries in Russia has led modern historians to stress the importance of the revolutionaries for Russia from the moment they first appeared. In the late 1870’s, however, Pobedonostsev’s faith in the fundamental loyalty of the narod to the regime was probably not as unrealistic as it might appear. The revolutionary populists were most often rejected by the peasants to whom they appealed. Pobedonostsev had great faith that the government could rely on the devotion of the narod.

Pobedonostsev obtained the institutional base from which he would proceed to work out the consequences of his ideology when he became Over Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1880. In 1881 he was able to exercise decisive influence on the new Emperor Alexander III in the events that led to the issuing of the Manifesto on the Reaffirmation of Autocracy that Pobedonostsev had written. His opposition to any continuation of the reform policies of the previous reign was a direct consequence of his ideology. His success in stopping the adoption of the “constitution” of Loris-Melikov ended hope for peaceful constitutional evolution in Russia and ushered in the era of reaction and counter-reform that would last until 1905.

Pobedonostsev’s own contribution to the counter-reforms appeared in the form of four pieces of legislation issued in 1884 and 1885. The reform of the number of Orthodox parishes and of their structure, as well as reform of the Church’s schools embodied in these laws constitutes Pobedonostsev’s plan for the Russian Orthodox Church, his program as Over Procurator. It too was a logical consequence of his ideology. He desired to increase the number of churches and clergymen serving the narod. He wanted those clergymen to be priests not trained theologians or men learned in secular disciplines. Their chief duty was only to perform the Orthodox liturgy completely, beautifully, and often. The Church for Pobedonostsev was more an institution of the Russian narod than it was the successor to the Patriarchate of Constantinople that it claimed to be. He meant to bind it more closely than ever to the masses it was meant to serve.

Of the four measures that made up Pobedonostsev’s program by far the most important to him was the law on the parish schools of 1884. Pobedonostsev designed those schools to be the principal educational institution of the narod. Its function was to tie education to the Church, to provide the basics of literacy in a manner understandable to the narod while strengthening the attachment of the narod to Orthodoxy and the state. His success in founding and spreading the parish schools was remarkable. By the time he left office in 1905 the parish schools constituted nearly half of all popular education in Russia. He had created a huge system of public instruction that was a major part of the Imperial government’s drive to attain universal literacy, a goal to which Pobedonostsev was wholeheartedly devoted. The parish schools were Pobedonostsev’s major accomplishment and the fullest embodiment of his ideology.

That being said, we must not forget how limited the education those schools provided really was. Many of them existed only in someone’s home and provided the most absolutely basic instruction if indeed they provided any at all. Most of the others offered only two years of instruction. The most education any of them offered was only four years. Pobedonostsev was not trying to create a truly well-educated population. He was trying to create only the most basic literacy, and he tied that literacy to the Russian Orthodox Church, its liturgy, singing, and doctrines, not to any goal of secular education. The parish schools were better than nothing, and we must never forget the realities of Russian life when we evaluate them.[2] Still, in 1905, most of the Russian population was educated to nothing like the levels prevalent in Western Europe or the United States.

Pobedonostsev’s long career in state service ended amid the turmoil of the Revolution of 1905. His participation in the events of that year was limited to questions involving the Church, and those efforts had their effect. His letters to Nicholas II in the spring of 1905 were no doubt largely responsible for the Emperor’s decision not to call the general council of the Church that was being demanded in many quarters both inside and outside the Church. His argument in those letters is a perfect illustration of this ideology in action, appealing to historical precedent and the desires of the narod as authority for his ideas.

Pobedonostsev’s personality was as complex and many-sided as was his career in public service. He was not a notably friendly or sociable man. He preferred a life of seclusion and study to a  life in the public spotlight. He preferred books to people and resented the numerous intrusions into his privacy that were inevitable given his high position in the government. He was very nearly humorless. It is difficult to imagine him laughing and joking with friends. He took life much too seriously for that. He was almost continually depressed, morose, and gloomy. He was in all probability an unpleasant man to be around for any length of time.

There was, however, another an considerably less well-known aspect of his personality. There is no doubt that he was a devoutly religious man in his own way. He loved the Russian Orthodox Church with all his heart, or at least he loved its beautiful and powerful liturgy. In the Church he found a spiritual and emotional release that helped him survive the depression and morbidity that characterized so much of his life. In his statements on the Church service there is a joy and an elevation of spirit found nowhere else in his writings. In his relationship with the Church he was capable of a great sentimentality that could on occasion become maudlin and saccharine. The sincerity of his feelings cannot , however, be questioned, and his love of the Church had important consequences for his policies as Over Procurator. We see it, for example, in his frequently expressed desire to teach people Church singing. I doubt that ever said he wanted to teach people Church theology.

Was Pobedonostsev’s faith in the Russian narod justified? Was the narod in fact what Pobedonostsev always claimed it was? There is little doubt that for most of the period we have been discussing the mass of Russians were loyal subjects of the tsar and at least nominally children of the Russian Orthodox Church. They could hardly be otherwise, given the traditions of Russian life and the resistance to change that has always characterized backward, peasant societies. Still, despite his awareness of many of the vices of the narod, his view of it turns out to have been an idealization. He saw in it strength, faith, and virtue. He saw it as the force in which autocracy and Orthodoxy were grounded and made secure. Yet the Russian narod turned out not to be quite so loyal to Orthodoxy and autocracy. By 1905 unrest had become so widespread that sweeping concessions buy the government were necessary to stop the erosion of public confidence in the government. By 1917, only ten years after Pobedonostsev’s death, virtually no support for the autocracy remained at all, and the last Russian emperor fell from power almost without resistance. Pobedonostsev’s beloved narod did nothing to preserve autocracy. Under the Soviet government the Russian Orthodox Church was reduced almost to a caricature of its former self. It supported a government that oppressed it and retained only a most tenuous hold on a small portion of the Russian population. Unlike autocracy the Russian Orthodox Church didn’t die under Communism. It has had a resurgence to a place of prominence in Russian life since the fall of the Soviet Union. I recently saw on TV an Orthodox priest blessing a Russian rocket before it blasted off to take astronauts into space, something that certainly would not have happened under the Communists. Vladimir Putin uses the Orthodox Church, perhaps quite cynically, for his own political purposes. Yet it cannot be said that the Russian narod defended the Church with the vigor Pobedonostsev would have expected. In the end the narod as a source of strength for an unaltered autocracy and an unchanging Orthodoxy turned out to be a mirage. Pobedonostsev’s fall from power in 1905 corresponded with the first act of the great drama that was so to transform the Russia he loved and defended.

In the end Pobedonostsev appears as a tragic figure. He spend his life defending a system that was doomed to failure. His devotion to that system, to the autocracy, the Russian Orthodox Church, and his romanticized image of the narod kept him from seeing how weak Russia really was. He may have put his faith in God, but he also put in a population that truly was not what he thought it was. He fought to preserve that which could not be preserved. He was a true conservative, and in his commitment to keeping what could not be kept his dream went the way of all conservative dreams, into the dustbin of history. Konstantin Petrovich, you are indeed a fascinating character. I just wish you had seen the reality of your nation and her people more clearly. If Imperial Russia had tried in earnest to modernize, to democratize, and to deal in truly constructive ways with her manifold problems perhaps her future would have been different. Pobedonostsev was one of the figures who kept it from being different. We can only wish that it had been otherwise.

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[1] Sobornost’ means something like “communality.” It is based on the Russian ecclesiastical word sobor, which means “council.” It refers to a desire for the different parts of society to work together, I suppose as if they met regularly in council.

[2] As I write it I can hear Pobedonostsev applauding that last statement I just made.

Where Was God?

This is the sermon I gave on July 17, 2016, after the terrorist attack in Nice, France.

Where Was God?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

July 17, 2016

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

July 14 is Bastille Day in France. It is that nation’s big national holiday. It is to the French what the Fourth of July is to us Americans. Nice is a resort city on France’s Mediterranean coast not far from France’s border with Italy. Three days ago, on July 14, thousands of French people together with many people from other countries gathered in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais, a broad paved area next to the Mediterranean beach, to watch fireworks over the sea. It must have been a joyous occasion. Families were there with their children. I imagine young lovers out enjoying being together as they celebrated their nation and watched a spectacular show. Probably there were older people there for whom the Bastille Day fireworks over the water had been an annual tradition for many years. It all seems so wonderful. Thousands of people out for a celebration in a beautiful place.

Who would not love to have been there? Who could imagine doing anything to ruin such a joyous occasion for so many people? I can’t imagine why anyone would ruin it, but three days ago someone did. A man who lived in Nice had gone out and rented a refrigerated truck. Perhaps not as big as the rigs that clog the freeways throughout Europe, but a good sized truck nonetheless. He drove to the Promenade. He turned off the lights. He waited until the fireworks show was over. Then he drove that truck straight into the crowd of people on the Promenade. He zig zagged as he plowed people down, trying to hit as many of them as possible. At last count he killed 84 people, all kinds of people, men, women, and children. He severely injured scores more. It turned a scene of joy and celebration into a scene of unimaginable horror. The police shot and killed him, but not before he had killed and maimed all those innocent people. I don’t think those of us who weren’t there can even imagine what it must have been like. It was horror way beyond our experience. Horror that will live in the memory of the survivors and of the French nation forever.

Now, I don’t know about you; but I know that when terrible things like this happen many people instinctively ask questions about God. Some ask Why would God do this? Others ask How could God let this happen? I have a question too, but it’s a slightly different question. When terrible things happen, whether caused by human sin or by natural phenomena like earthquakes and tsunamis, I ask: Where was God? Had God abandoned the places where tragedies occur or the people who become the victims of them? I never think God causes tragedies. God doesn’t. God is a God of love and care Who wants a whole life for every one of God’s creatures. I could never love or seek to serve a God who caused things like the horror in Nice or so many other places. I know God through Jesus Christ, and Jesus just simply would never cause people to suffer and die. Jesus would never run over children with a truck. So let’s start by letting go of the notion that human tragedies are somehow God’s doing. They aren’t.

So if God isn’t in these horrible events as cause, where is God when they happen? Frankly, I don’t quite understand why so many Christians have so much trouble answering that question or why so many of us answer the question by blaming God for what has happened. I don’t understand those things, you see, precisely because we Christians know God in and through Jesus Christ. The answer to where was God when that truck mowed down all those people in Nice the other night lies precisely in the story of Jesus Christ that is the foundation of our faith. So let’s look at that story and see what answer it gives us to the question of where was God.

We start with two essential facts. First, there was an actual person named Jesus of Nazareth. Second, that person was God Incarnate. He was the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, become human, as human as we are. When we see Jesus we aren’t seeing just another person. Yes, he was a human person, but he was also so much more than that. He was Immanuel, God With Us. As God Incarnate he lived a human life. He taught us about God through his words, but perhaps even more importantly he taught us about God through his life. And he taught us about God through his death.

A great tragedy happened in Nice the other night. Another great tragedy happened on a hill outside Jerusalem so many years ago. That tragedy was the crucifixion of Jesus. As a human being Jesus was unfairly arrested, unfairly tried, unfairly tortured, and unfairly nailed to a cross to die a slow and miserable death. All of those things happened to Jesus as a man, but they also happened to Jesus as the Son of God Incarnate. All of those things happened to Jesus, and in Jesus they happened to God. The Romans thought they were executing just another human troublemaker. We know they were executing a lot more than that. They were executing the Son of God.

A terrible tragedy happened to Jesus, and God didn’t stop it. God didn’t cause it either, but God didn’t stop it. Why not? Here’s the only answer to that question that makes sense to me. God didn’t stop it because in and through Jesus Christ God wanted to show us definitively how God relates to human life. To show us how God relates to all of human life, the good and the bad, the joyous and the tragic, the times of peace and love and the times of unspeakable horror. In Jesus God shows us how God relates to everything that happens to us and everything that happens to anyone anywhere in God’s beloved creation. In Jesus Christ God shows us precisely that God does not intervene in the life of the world to stop tragedies from happening. Why God doesn’t do that is a difficult question that I don’t think anyone has answered satisfactorily. I think it has to do with the nature of creation as creation, but that’s a topic for another day. What matters now is that our inability to understand doesn’t  change the reality that God does not intervene in the life of the world to stop bad things from happening. How do we know that? Because a very, very bad thing happened to God’s Incarnate Son, and God didn’t stop it. If God’s not going to stop tragedy for Jesus, God’s not going to stop tragedy for anyone else either.

No, God didn’t stop the brutal execution of Jesus, but God was anything but remote from Jesus’ suffering and dying. God was Incarnate in Jesus, so as Jesus suffered and died God was fully present with Jesus in his suffering and dying. That’s how God relates to human suffering and death. Not by preventing them. Not by judging them. By being present with God’s children, all of them, when they suffer and die. By being present with us as we suffer and die. In Jesus Christ we know that God is not remote from us when things get bad. Rather, God is unshakably present with us, in solidarity with us, in all of the bad things that happen to us. In suffering and death God is present, suffering and dying with us. In suffering and death God is present with us, holding us up, helping us bear what we must bear, and giving us hope for better things on the other side of our suffering and death. Sustaining presence. Unshakable solidarity. That’s how God relates to human suffering and death. Thanks be to God!

More than ten years ago I gave a sermon along these lines after a terrible earthquake in Indonesia caused an enormous tsunami that killed a couple of hundred thousand people in places that border the Indian Ocean. In that sermon I asked Where was God? And I answered on the beaches, in the water, with the victims. That’s where God was, not stopping the tragedy but being present with God’s people in it. Today I give the same answer to the question Where was God on that promenade along the Mediterranean when a madman plowed into the people with a rented truck. Where was God? On the promenade. With the victims. Suffering with the victims, then welcoming the victims home after their deaths. God is in the hospitals suffering with the injured, holding them, hoping they recover but ready to welcome them home too if they do not. With the victims. That’s where God always is. That’s where God wants us to be too.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, was the ultimate victim of human hatred and injustice. God was in him, showing us how God relates to human tragedy. God is with the victims of terror. God is with the victims of natural disaster too. God is with us, each and every one of us, when we need God the most, when we suffer, and when we die. Folks, that is the best news there ever was or ever could be. We know that suffering and death are inescapable parts of human life. They were inescapable parts of Jesus’ life, and they are inescapable parts of our lives. And God is there. With us. Holding us. Getting us through, and finally welcoming us to our eternal home with God. Where was God in Nice that horrible night? With the victims. God is always with the victims, and God is always with us. We aren’t victims like the people on that promenade in Nice were, and I don’t mean to suggest that we are; but we are God’s beloved children, and God will never abandon us. God will be with us always, come what may. We see that great good news in Jesus Christ. Hold onto it. Live into it. It will get you through. It will get you home. Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Politics of Fear

The Politics of Fear:

Conservatism and the Dynamics of Change

I have had a good deal of exposure to conservatives and conservatism in recent times. I serve a small church that has within it several people of a very conservative theological and political bent. I have written before about how conservative, literalistic Christianity is brittle. Dislodge just one of its elements and the whole thing collapses. Forty years ago I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on a very conservative Russian civil servant and Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. I am presently in the process of turning that dissertation into a book that I might self-publish. The man I wrote about, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, could tolerate no significant change in the structure of tsarist Russia because, I think, he feared a total collapse of the system he knew and served if much of anything fundamental was changed in it. I just started reading David Remnick’s book Lenin’s Tomb about the last days of the Soviet Union in which among other things he reports on conversations he had at the time with some very conservative Soviet people. Remnick’s neo-Stalinists bristled at the thought of any change in the Soviet structure because to them it meant that their whole world was about to collapse. These days the news media bombard us with Donald Trump’s American brand of neo-fascism. All in all it’s been more exposure to conservatives and conservatism than I would really like.

I am nearly as far from a conservative as you can get myself, so all this recent exposure to conservative personalities and conservative thinking has got me thinking more about conservatism than I would otherwise choose to do. As I have reflected on these manifestations of conservatism some similarities among them have occurred to me. First of all, all of them arose and were expressed in times of radical change in the worlds their adherents had known. Pobedonostsev lived through and even worked a bit on the reforms in the structure of the Russian state under Alexander II. Then he experienced the rise of radical threats to that structure and the state’s desperate efforts to defeat those threats. He spent his life trying to preserve that which was already doomed. Conservative American Christianity arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a reaction against a changing world, a world of higher biblical criticism and evolutionary biology. Remnick interviewed his neo-Stalinists in the world of perestroika and glasnost’ under Mikhail Gorbachev, changes that would undo the world these people had grown up and supported, a world in which they had prospered, at least by Russian standards of prosperity. Donald Trump has arisen out of the hardly admirable world of real estate wheeling and dealing and the even less reputable world of reality television. He has come to prominence at a time when the world is transitioning from modernism to post modernism, a world in which the United States of America is changing radically and rapidly from a world in which straight, white, Protestant Christian men ran the show into a much more diverse America in which those formerly dominant men are losing much of the privilege that raised them above others in their society. These different examples of conservative thinking come from different times and places, but all have in common that they are expressions of resistance to change that these conservatives want to stop.

All of these expressions of resistance to change are grounded in a common emotion, the emotion of fear. Their adherents would most likely not say they were afraid. They might not sound afraid. They would say they are angry, and they would sound angry. Yet anger is almost always grounded in fear, and it certainly is in these cases I’ve mentioned here. How could Pobedonostsev cling doggedly to the belief that the Russian people supported autocracy as he did unless he was terrified of what would happen if that autocracy fell? How can Biblical literalists insist as vehemently as they do that everything in the Bible is and must be factually true unless they are terrified of what would happen if they only truth they know was shown not to be true? How could Nina Alexandrovna Andreyevna and the other neo-Stalinists Remnick interviewed cling to a thoroughly whitewashed view of Stalin and his atrocities, ignoring the factual evidence and holding onto a false history, unless they were terrified of what might happen if the supposedly solid Soviet structure that had nurtured them were shown to grounded in lies and crimes against humanity? How can Americans, mostly white Protestant American men, support the insanity and inanity of Donald Trump about walling off the US-Mexican border, denying entry into the country to all Muslims, and so much more of his vitriol and bigotry unless they are terrified of what will become of them when they lose the privilege they had and just took for granted? I am convinced that the answer to all of those questions is: “They couldn’t.” Fear explains how otherwise intelligent and rational people can cling to the structures and ways of the past when those structures and ways are turning to quicksand under their feet. Fear explains how people can cling to structures and worldviews that are passing into history when all of the available evidence shows how those structures and worldviews are changing and must change. Fear explains how otherwise intelligent and rational people think they can stop the world in its tracks and return it to the idealized past they have constructed for themselves. Fear explains hatred. Fear explains how desperate conservatives can hurl calumny at decent and caring people who see the world better than they do. Across the board conservative politics are the politics of fear.

Radical conservatism is grounded in fear, and it is futile. The old saying that the only constant in life is change is true. All of the people in my examples here tried to stop or are trying to stop that which cannot be stopped. They clung or are clinging to lost causes. Pobedonostsev’s Russia collapsed into anarchy and then totalitarianism only ten years after his death. Fundamentalist, literalistic Christianity is dead because its assumptions are untenable and its consequences are unacceptable. It’s just that some of its adherents don’t know yet that it is dead. The structure of the USSR that Stalin built collapsed completely only three years or so after Remnick interviewed Nina Alexandrovna Andreyevna. Radical conservatism is always a commitment to a lost cause. It is always grounded in a fear of losing what its proponents have and think they know, the only world they have experienced and, sadly, the only world they can imagine. What radical conservatism inevitably fails to discern is that the world to which it so desperately clings first of all never existed and secondly could not be preserved even if it had. It’s frantic effort to prevent change may have temporary successes from time to time, but in the long run it always fails.

You’d think humanity would have learned by now. You’d think that anyone with a high school education in history would see that the world is constantly changing. You’d think they would see that the old guard defenders of what was, or at least of what they think was, always fail in the long run. Our world today is quite radically different from the world into which I was born only seventy years ago. If we look back farther than that we see worlds so alien to ours that we have to work hard in order to understand the people of those worlds. The only constant is change. That seems so obvious to me that I don’t see how anyone can deny it.

Now, of course not all change is good, and not all change is the change leading to a new future. The lesson of history is not that we must embrace any change that anyone advocates. Not at all. Perhaps unfortunately the challenge we face is more difficult than that. We must discern the larger trends of change, not the mere fads of fashion. Fashion changes rapidly, the world changes slowly. Fashion changes, as nearly as I can tell, because of human vanity and to make money for clothing designers, manufacturers, and retailers. The world changes we know not why, but change it always does. On the whole it changes in the direction of freedom. On the whole it changes in the direction of liberation. It has reversals to be sure. The first half of the twentieth century can be seen as one big but temporary reversal. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice. On the whole I think he was right about that. The task history places before us is to discern how the arc of the universe is bending, then to help it bend. Bend it will whether we like it or not, whether we help it or not. Bend it will even if we try to straighten it out. That’s what conservative ideology always does, it tries to straighten out the arc of the universe. I has never succeeded for long. It cannot ever succeed for long because it works against the dynamics of the universe. Call them the dynamics of God if you like. Whoever’s dynamics they are, they are inexorable; and on the whole they work for good.

The politics of fear always fail. They always have, and they always will. Conservatism grounded in fear is the fight for a lost cause. In our country it fought to preserve slavery, and it lost. It fought to preserve Jim Crow, and it lost. It fought to keep women out of what it thought were male professions, and it lost. It fought and fights to maintain bigotry and discrimination against LGBT people, and it lost, or at least it is losing. Today radical conservatism fights against a truly multi-cultural, multi-religious America, and it will lose. Radical conservatism is grounded in privilege and the fear of losing that privilege. In the short run we must oppose it. In the long run, it hasn’t got a chance. Thanks be to God!