Jesus' Most Radical Change

Jesus’ Most Radical Change: On Love of Enemies

August 29, 2020

Jesus’ relationship to Torah law is, shall we say, complicated. I want here to look at the portions of the Sermon on the Mount that deal with Torah law to try to get some idea of how Jesus related to it. There are other places that are relevant to the question that I won’t go into here. They include, for example, his statement that it is not what goes into a person that defiles but what comes out. Matthew 15:11. I’ll consider here primarily that passages in which Jesus addresses his relationship to the law by saying something like “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” I will look most closely at the passage in that format that addresses the question of love of enemies.

Jesus begins his discussion of the law in the Sermon on the Mount with these words:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:17-20.

Sounds pretty clear, doesn’t it. Don’t you dare mess with the law of Moses. To follow Jesus you must obey the Torah law more strictly than even the scribes or Pharisees observe it. The scribes and the Pharisees of course taught that every Jew must obey every jot and tittle of the law in order to be righteous, that is, in order to be in right relationship with God. It’s not clear how anyone could obey the Torah law more strictly than the scribes and Pharisees told people to obey it, but never mind. It sure sounds here like Jesus is telling us that Torah law is as valid and important in Christianity than it is in Pharisaic Judaism.

I have heard people say that that is precisely what Jesus means. I have been accused of denying Jesus’ Jewishness because I have taught that his position with regard to the law was actually quite different from what Matthew 5:17-20 makes it sound like. I respond that I would never deny Jesus’ Jewishness, but he was a different kind of Jew than were the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus discovered and lifted up a different Jewish voice, the voice of the eighth century BCE prophets with their demand for justice for the poor. That voice is thoroughly Jewish, but it isn’t Pharisaic. It prefers Isaiah, Amos, and Micah to Leviticus, but it is a Jewish voice.

There still remains however a question about just what Jesus’ relationship to the Torah law actually was. Did he just read it, preach it, and leave it at that? Or did he do something creative with it? Did he change it? Yes he did. He didn’t abolish it, but he did change it. We see what Jesus’ relationship to the law was in the verses that immediately follow Matthew 5:17-20. The next line of the Sermon on the Mount in which these verses appear is, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder….’ But I say to you….” Matthew 5:21-22a. I want to say, “Wait a minute!” Jesus just quoted Exodus 20:13, “You shall not murder.” He says that that one of the Ten Commandments was said not to the people of his time but to people of ancient times. Then he says, “But I say to you….” You mean he’s going to say something different from what the Torah says? You bet he is. He says: But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister you will be liable to the council: and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” Matthew 5:21-22. True, Jesus doesn’t say you don’t have to obey the commandment against murder, but he hasn’t left that commandment unchanged either. He has made it a matter not just of external acts but of internal emotions. He has broadened the scope of impermissible acts to include statements as well as actions. He’s made the law harder to obey, but he certainly hasn’t left it unchanged.

There is actually a way to understand what Jesus has done with the law in this instance as Pharisaic. The Pharisees were so zealous about people obeying Torah law that they did what scholars call build a fence around it. They wanted people not even to come close to violating a Torah commandment. That way they would never actually violate one. That’s what Jesus is doing here with the law against murder. If you guard yourself against anger you’re less likely to violate the law against murder than you are if you don’t. Jesus understood that sinful acts come from sinful emotions, so in his remarks on the law against murder he tells us to avoid even those sinful emotions.

He has however done nothing Pharisaic in two of the four modifications of the law that follow in the same format.  They are:

“You have heard that is was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Matthew 5:27-28. We must concede that what he does here with the law against adultery is Pharisaic, for if you never lust after a woman you’re less likely to commit adultery with her than if you do lust after her.

“It was also said, ‘whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery.” Matthew 5:31-32. This modification of the law is not at all Pharisaic.

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely….But I say to you, ‘Do not swear at all….” Matthew 5:33-34. He does handle this one like a Pharisee, drawing a line around false swearing by forbidding all swearing.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” Matthew 5:38-39. This one isn’t particularly Pharisaic.

In these passages Jesus changes the law. He changes it in radical ways. He makes it stricter. He internalizes much of it, making it not just a matter of external actions but of internal thoughts and emotions as well.

There is of course a great deal that could be said about each of these changes to the law. On the actual meaning of “Do not resist an evildoer” for example see my book Liberating Christianity, pages 162-163.[1] I won’t go into all that now. I want instead to consider at greater length the last item in the same format that Jesus also gives us. Jesus says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:43-44. Jesus’ call to us to love our enemies is easily the most radical transformation of Jewish teaching of any of the changes to it that Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount. Here’s why.

In each of the other statements we’re considering here Jesus changes a commandment that really is in the Torah. “You shall not murder” is at Exodus 20:13. You shall not commit adultery is at Exodus 20:14. The law on divorce is at Deuteronomy 24:1-4. The prohibition of swearing falsely is at Exodus 20:7. The saying “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is at Exodus 21:24. Jesus knew his Torah law very well. He knew it, and he thought it didn’t go far enough. So he changed it in radical ways.

His saying about love of enemies is a bit different. The saying “You shall love your neighbor” is indeed in the Torah. You’ll find it at Leviticus 19:18. The phrase “You shall hate your enemies” however, is not in the Torah, at least not explicitly. You won’t find the commandment “You shall hate your enemies” anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, at least not is so many words. Jesus here is reading something into the law that isn’t quite there.

There are passages in the Hebrew Bible from which one can easily extrapolate “hate your enemies” as something of which God supposedly would approve. Thus at 1 Samuel 15:1-3 we read:

Samuel said to Saul, ‘the Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel. Now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’

On what the Amalekites did when the Israelites came up out of Egypt that has gotten God so mad at them see Exodus 17:8-13. It is clear that at one time the ancient Israelites considered the Amalekites to be their enemy. We can assume they hated them. It seems equally clear that in this passage God hates them too. It’s not hard to extrapolate a commandment to hate enemies from passages like this one.

Then there’s Psalm 137. It comes from the time of the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people in the sixth century BCE. The Babylonian Empire has besieged Jerusalem and taken it. The Babylonians have hauled at least all of the prominent people of Judah off into forced exile back in Babylon hundreds of miles east of Jerusalem across barren desert. Psalm 137 begins as a lament over that tragic turn of events:

By the rivers of Babylon—

       there we sat down and there

              we wept

       when we remembered Zion. Psalm 137:1.

We can certainly sympathize with that sentiment. The Babylonian exile was the most tragic event in Israelite history since the days of slavery in Egypt. But then Psalm 137 changes its tone dramatically:

O daughter Babylon, you

              devastator!

       Happy shall they be who pay

              you back

       what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take

              your little ones

       and dash them against the rock! Psalm 137:8-9.

It’s not exactly God who praises infanticide here, and like 1 Samuel the Psalms are not part of the Torah; but these verses are in Hebrew scripture. Babylon was indeed Israel’s enemy. Surely no one calls for the murder of another people’s children the way Psalm 137 does without hating that people. So while “hate your enemies” isn’t in Hebrew scripture in so many words there certainly are passages that quite obviously support that insidious notion.

Jesus will have none of it. He says:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward to you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? Matthew 5:43-46.

Love your enemies for God loves them by not withholding sun and rain from them, sun and rain of course both being essential for any agricultural economy like that of ancient Israel. This, I believe, is Jesus’ most radical recasting if not quite of Jewish law than at least of common Jewish thought and emotions.

Why is this one of  Jesus’ changer in Jewish thought the most radical? Because it goes straight to the heart of the most destructive human emotion of all, hatred. Humans hating other humans has distorted and debased humanity at least since the rise of civilization many thousands of years ago. Hatred leads to maiming and murder. Hatred leads to war. Hatred leads to genocide. It did in the United States against Native Americans. It did in Nazi Germany against the Jews. Hatred doesn’t just cause violence, though it certainly does. Hatred harms the hater at least by keeping that person’s soul disquieted and ill at ease. Hatred destroys relationships, even relationships once grounded in love.

Hating is the most destructive thing we humans do, yet it is also something that comes so naturally and easily to us. Who among us can say we’ve never hated anyone? Perhaps Jesus never did, but the rest of us? Certainly not me. Even Saint Paul once hated people he called followers of the Way, people later called Christians. We find it so hard not to hate. Our American culture tragically teaches us white people to hate Black people. As I was growing up during what we called the Cold War I was taught not only to hate Communism but to hate the people of Communist countries. I was lucky. I spent five weeks in the Soviet Union in 1968 and an academic year in Russia in 1975-76. I learned firsthand that Russians are people like the rest of us and that there is no reason to hate them. Most Americans weren’t so lucky. In the 1950s and 1960s hatred was a big part of the American way of life. Tragically it still is.

Jesus says don’t hate. Don’t hate even your enemies or those who persecute you. When he says love your enemies he is telling us to transform or overcome what seems to be an inherently human trait. He is calling us to do what seems impossible. It almost seems like he’s calling us to stop being human. Living without hating would radically transform how most people live. What do you mean I have to love the people who flew crowded airliners into the World Trade Center? Not only can’t I love them, it just feels wrong to love them. They weren’t after all lovable, but Jesus doesn’t call us to love only the lovable. He didn’t have to call us to do that. We’d do it anyway.

So we’re supposed to love our enemies, to love people we’d rather hate. But just what does that mean? What does loving our enemies actually look like? Jesus doesn’t explain it here. Paul has a brief interpretation of it in Romans. He says, “No, if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Romans 12:20. I don’t think heaping burning coals on anyone’s head is a Christian thing to do. It sure doesn’t sound like loving your enemies, but never mind. I think we can get a better idea of what Jesus means by “love your enemies” by looking at the meaning of the word translated as “love” and by considering what love of enemies might look like within Jesus’ larger scheme of salvation.

The Greek word translated as “love” at Matthew 5:44 is “agapate.” It is a verb form of the noun “agape,” which is the most common word for love in the New Testament. Agape is a particular and peculiar kind of love. It isn’t an emotion. It isn’t liking a lot. It certainly isn’t being romantically involved with. It is rather caring and giving for another. Agape is radically unselfish. It is self-giving for the sake of another. God’s love of creation is agape in its purest form. God gives of Godself freely and unconditionally for the sake of creation. Dean Martin sang “That’s amore.” We can say here “That’s agape.”

So what does agape of one’s enemies look like? It looks first of all like not hating them. Jesus makes this aspect of love of enemies clear in the way he sets up that command: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you love your enemies….” Matthew 5:43-44. Overcoming hatred is the first thing this passage is about.

Next, love of one’s enemy means not physically harming them. The Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches, once put out a bumper sticker that read: “When Jesus said love your enemy I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” Indeed. Love of anyone certainly involves not killing them, not even our enemies. We humans fail at this one all the time. Humans sometimes kill out of hatred, but we often kill mass numbers of people without hating them at all. Consider for example the famous story of the Christmas truce of World War I. At Christmastime 1914 at places along the western front German and allied forces spontaneously stopped firing at and killing each other. In many places they came out of their trenches and greeted each other with good holiday wishes. It is said that in some places they sang the carol “Silent Night” together. Then, after Christmas was over, they went right back to killing each other. These soldiers apparently didn’t hate each other. Nonetheless they went about the nasty business of war, the business of maiming and killing other human beings. They didn’t hate, but they did kill. As they did they certainly were not loving their enemy.

Loving one’s enemies also means seeking reconciliation with them rather than prolonging conflict with them. It doesn’t necessarily mean giving up all self-interest to placate an enemy. It means seeking common ground with them as a basis for ending everyone’s status as enemy. It means finding a way for former enemies to live together in peace. It doesn’t mean total self-abnegation, but it does mean being open to compromise with the enemy for the sake of peace.

We can also seek to understand love of enemies by looking at how that love fits into Jesus overall teachings and mission. In so much of the Bible what people wish for their enemies is their elimination, their death. Thus as 1 Samuel 15:1-3 as we have seen we find humans attributing to God a command that they kill every living thing among a people identified as an enemy. We’ve also seen how at Psalm 137:8-9 we find a Jewish author wishing that someone would commit infanticide against Babylonian children. At Psalm 139:19 the psalmist wishes that God would “kill the wicked.” The New Testament book of Revelation sees the solution to imperial violence and injustice as massive bloodshed and death. We humans are really good at wishing death and destruction on people we consider to be enemies.

Not so Jesus. His whole program is a call for a nonviolent transformation of the world through a transformation of each person from the ways of the world to the ways of God. See for example Mark 5:1-13. There Jesus exorcises a demon named Legion out of a possessed man. A legion was a unit of the Roman army roughly equivalent to a modern regiment or division. A demon named Legion possessing a man symbolizes the way that we humans internalize the violent ways of the world. Jesus exorcising Legion symbolizes his desire for all of us to expel the ways of the world, the ways of violence and injustice, out of our minds and spirits and replace them with God’s values of justice and peace. Jesus wants to transform the whole world into the kingdom of God through that kind of personal transformation.

Loving our enemies then means praying not for their deaths but for their transformation. Just as Jesus calls us to transform ourselves as the means for creating the kingdom of God on earth, so his commandment to love our enemies calls us to pray and to work for the transformation of enemies into friends. It can be done. We always begin the work of transformation with prayer not for our enemy’s death but for their radical transformation, forgetting never that we need that transformation too. I believe that Jesus’ call to us to love our enemies involves all of these things and no doubt many more. And of course everything we say and do must be grounded in love.

Just think how different the world would be if no one hated anyone and everyone loved everyone. That’s the world Jesus calls us to. He goes straight to the heart of the matter when he tells us to love our enemies. He will never let some ancient law no matter how sacred stand in the way of the transformation of love. He knew it wasn’t easy. He knew we’d never do it perfectly. He also knew how absolutely essential it is if the world the way it is will ever be transformed into the kingdom of God, into the way God wants it to be. So he calls us to the most radical transformation of ourselves imaginable, the transformation from hatred to love even of enemies. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

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[1] Thomas C. Sorenson, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008), 162-163.

Yes and No

Yes and No

August 27, 2020

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

I have a confession to make. I’ve never been much into the Psalms. I wrote about them in Liberating the Bible, but I discuss there only a few of them and don’t say all that much.[1] I’ve always loved Psalm 139, or at least most of it. More about that anon. I carried a copy of most of it in the front of my class notebook all the way through seminary. I suppose I memorized Psalm 23 in Sunday School like so many of us did. Still, I never paid a whole lot of attention to the Psalms, that is I haven’t until recently. As I have been idled by the coronavirus pandemic as so many people have I have started to use the daily lectionary from the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship Daily Prayer.[2] In that lectionary there are four Psalms or passages from Psalms for each day, two for use in the morning and two for use in the evening. I’ve been reading all of them. I’ve written up ideas that have come to me from some of them. Those writings are on this blog. As I have been spending more time with the Psalms than I ever have before something about the Psalms that I actually did know before has struck me anew. The Psalms contain magnificent, moving, inspiring, and compelling expressions of faith. To those passages I say an enthusiastic yes. But the Psalms also contain passages to which I can only say simply no. I want to wrestle with that truth in this piece. Here are some examples.

I was reminded of this truth recently as I read Psalm 143 from the daily lectionary I’ve been using. It starts out nicely:

Hear my prayer, O Lord;

       give ear to my supplications in

              your faithfulness;

       answer me in your

              righteousness.

Do not enter into judgment with

              your servant,

       for no one is righteous

              before you. Psalm 143:1-2.

Then, however, it does what so many Psalms do. It starts going on about the psalmist’s “enemy:”

For the enemy has pursued

              me,

       crushing my life to the ground,

       making me sit in darkness like

              those long dead. Psalm 143:5.

This Psalm has some other very nice lines in it:

I stretch out my hands to you;

       my soul thirsts for you like a

              parched land. Psalm 143:6.

And:

Let me hear of your steadfast

              love in the morning,

       for in you I put my trust.

Teach me to do your will,

       for you are my God.

Let your good spirit lead me

       on a level path. Psalm 143:10.

Very nice indeed. But then we come to verse 12:

In your steadfast love cut off my

              enemies,

       and destroy all of my adversaries,

       for I am your servant. Psalm 143:12.

That’s how the Psalm ends, with a plea to God to destroy some of God’s people whom the psalmist considers his enemies. That’s something I find very troubling indeed.

Then there’s my favorite Psalm that I mentioned above, Psalm 139. What I loved about this Psalm when I was in seminary was mostly how it begins:

O Lord, you have searched me

              and known me.

You know when I sit down and

              when I rise up;

       you discern my thoughts from

              far away.

You search out my path and my

              lying down,

       and are acquainted with all

              my ways. Psalm 139:1-3.

Psalm 139 is also about how God is with us no matter what, and I love that part of the Psalm too. Even if we try to get away from God, God is still with us:

Where can I go from your spirit?

       Or where can I flee from your

              presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are

              there;

       if I make my bed in Sheol, you

              are there.

If I take the wings of the

              morning,

       and settle at the furthest limits

              of the sea,

even there your hand shall

              lead me,

       and your right hand shall hold

              me fast. Psalm 139:7-10.

Verse 18b reads:

I come to the end—I am still

       with you.

I love this Psalm because I know that earlier in my life God knew me far better than I knew myself. I also love it because I know that I need reassurance that God is always with me no matter what. These are for me among the most reassuring verses in the Bible. I loved them when I was in seminary. I love them still.

But them we come to verses 19 to 22. They read:

O that you would kill the wicked,

              O God,

       and that the bloodthirsty would

              depart from me—

those who speak of you

              maliciously,

       and lift themselves up against

              you for evil.

Do I not hate those who hate

              you, O Lord?

       And do I not loathe those who

              rise up against you?

I hate them with perfect hatred;

       I count them my enemies.

After this paean to hatred and death Psalm 139 ends on a much better note:

Search me, O God, and know my

              heart,

       test me and know my thoughts.

See if there is any wicked way

              in me,

       and lead me in the way

              everlasting. Psalm 139:23-24.

So in Psalm 139 we get some of the most beautiful and reassuring verses in the Bible, and we get some of the verses I and many people most dislike and cannot accept.

In Psalm 137 gets worse than those unfortunate lines of Psalm 139. That Psalm begins as a moving cry of despair by the Jews who have been hauled off to exile in Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem:

By the rivers of Babylon—

       there we sat down and there

              we wept

       when we remembered Zion. Psalm 137:1.

The psalmist cries:

How could we sing the Lord’s

              song

       in a foreign land? Psalm 137:4.

He vows never to forget Jerusalem. Psalm 137:5-6. Up to this point we sympathize with the grief and despair of the Hebrew exiles.

But then the Psalm changes its tune altogether:

O daughter Babylon, you

              devastator!

       Happy shall they be who pay

              you back

       what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take

              your little ones

       and dash them against the rock! Psalm 137:8-9.

Really? It would be a good thing if someone would kill Babylonian children by dashing them against a rock? I sure don’t think so. Even if we exulted in the destruction of Babylon like the prophet Nahum exulted in the destruction of Nineveh, which I would not, how can there be anything good about killing children by dashing them against a rock? There can’t, but Psalm 137 sure seems to think there would be. That’s how brutal, how primitive, the Psalms can become.

What are to make of this schizophrenic nature of so many of the Psalms? How can people of faith write verse of deep and insightful faith on the one hand, then turn and extol hatred and infanticide on the other? As king Mongkut of Siam says in “The King and I,” “’Tis a puzzlement.” Here’s the best I can do to resolve that puzzlement.

Like is true of everything in the Bible the Psalms are human creations. They come from a world far different from ours. Of course our world can be horribly violent. The world of the ancient Psalms was no less violent. Everyone just expected that rulers would engage in violence. They would kill their opponents. They would go to war. I don’t mean to suggest that more recent rulers were different in that regard, but that kind of violence was endemic in the ancient world. True, ancient war wasn’t nearly as destructive as modern war. The ancients didn’t have the immensely creative, expensive, and destructive weapons that we have. Still, war was endemic in the ancient world. Ancient history isn’t only a history of wars by any means, but any study of the ancient past must deal with an awful lot of them.

Human life can be treated as awfully cheap in our world, but it was if anything even cheaper in the ancient world. Those in power thought nothing of causing the deaths of large numbers of people for their own purposes, never mind that Hitler, Stalin, and others put them to shame in that regard in much more recent times. Ancient people could even imagine God ordering a king to kill every living thing among another people as a much delayed act of vengeance. See 1 Samuel 15:1-3. When we read texts from the ancient world we must try to understand how violent life in that world could be and how much less individual human lives were valued then than we value them now.

It is then less surprising than we may think that ancient writers would express approval of hatred, killing, and even infanticide. Those things were if anything more common and more widely expected if not approved in that world than in ours. We don’t know when most of the Psalms were written, Psalm 137 actually being an exception to that rule. We do know that ancient Israel could express profound and powerful truth about God and human spirituality. Just as clearly however ancient Israel had not yet outgrown the ancient practice of attributing very human thoughts and emotions to God including the most base of them. (Some people still make that mistake today, but never mind.) The ancient Hebrews could still believe that God shared and approved human emotions like hatred and actions like revenge. Few if any Jews (except maybe the most radically conservative of them) believe that today, but today’s Jews didn’t write the Psalms. Ancient Jews did. So we find there great spiritual falsehood alongside great spiritual wisdom. We might wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t.

The Psalms are human creations from an ancient world So with the Psalms as with everything else in the Bible we cannot simply accept everything we read there as divine truth. Some of what we find there is divine truth, but some of it very clearly isn’t. To some of it we can say a heartfelt “Yes!” To some of it we must say an equally heartfelt “No!” The discernment of what to accept and what to reject is ours. We can’t avoid it. We can and should ask God for guidance in our discernment. We Christians can and should look to Jesus as giving us the standard for our discernment, the standard of love. Many faithful Jewish people actually apply the same standard, for the rabbis of all times teach that everything in the Bible is about love. The one thing we cannot do is not discern the true from the false in the Bible. May God help you, and me, as we do that sacred work.

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[1] See Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume 2, The Old Testament (Briarwood, NY: Coffee Press, 2019) 227-239.

[2] Book of Common Worship Daily Prayer (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

August 26, 2020

It’s presidential election season in the United States. Donald Trump and the corrupt gang around him are holding what passes for a Republican nominating convention as I write. Never mind that it’s really just a campaign event that for some reason the TV networks think they have to carry. The same thing was true of the Democrats’ convention last week. I and all people of good well and moral sensitivity are outraged by Donald Trump and his administration. Trump is utterly incapable of empathy for anyone. He is a megalomaniac who truly cares only about himself. He is morally and ethically corrupt to the marrow of his bones. He knows no other way to be. He does not operate within the categories “true” and “false.” He operates only within “I think it’s good for me” and “I don’t think it’s good for me.” Therefore he lies at least as much as he tells the truth, probably more. He and his cronies are politically indebted to the selfish, self-absorbed extremely wealthy people of our country, so they pursue policies that make the rich richer and give not one good God damn about the rest of us, most especially not about the poor. They destroy the environment because they think preserving and protecting it costs them money, and money is the only thing they care about.

Trump cozies up to corrupt dictators like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Russia because Putin is what Trump wants to be, namely, the head of a cartel of corrupt oligarchs who faces no meaningful political opposition because opposing the president gets you killed in good Stalinist fashion. Witness Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s most significant opposition politician for some time now. He is currently in a hospital in Berlin after having been poisoned, almost certainly by Volodia Putin or someone who thought they were doing what Volodia wanted.[1] Trump is easily the most disastrous president in my seventy-three plus years of life and perhaps in all of American history, and that takes some doing. I know I’m supposed to love all of God’s children and hate no one. Sorry Lord. Please forgive me. I simply cannot love Donald Trump and have even been heard to say that I hate him. He is so destructive and immoral that I just can’t react to him any other way.

So I and so many others turn to Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for president this year. We look to Joe Biden to save us from Donald Trump. We support Biden through on line posts. We give money to his campaign. We have put or will put Biden/Harris bumper stickers on our cars and Biden/Harris yard signs in our front yards. Some of us do or will do volunteer work for his campaign. Most of all we will vote for him and try to get others to vote for him. We at least like his policies more or less even if we don’t think they’re sufficiently progressive. We truly do look to Biden to save us from Trump.

It is a weak reed we lean on. Joe Biden is seventy-seven years old. If he wins he will be seventy-eight when he is inaugurated. That’s too old. Biden’s age could well mean that he won’t serve out even one presidential term let alone two. Thank God he has Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate. His voting record in Congress was never progressive enough. He doesn’t support universal single-payer health insurance, which is one of our most pressing needs today. He has a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth in awkward and embarrassing ways. He comes from a small state that would vote for the Democratic candidate in any event, so he doesn’t bring a home state to the electoral college that the Democrats wouldn’t have with any other candidate. He was never my first choice as Democratic presidential nominee or even my second or third. That is true for a great many progressive Democrats and independent Christian socialists like me.

There are nonetheless compelling reasons to vote for Joe Biden. His main virtue is that he is not Donald Trump. Moreover, he is the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald Trump and get him out of office. Biden is a decent person, or at least he comes across as one. He has suffered more personal tragedy in his life than anyone ever should. It seems to have made him empathetic with people in need. His policies, while not ideal, will be a whole lot better, less destructive, that Trump’s are. With Biden as president we’d be rid of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump,  Donald Trump, Jr., Steven Miller, and all the other disastrous White House and Cabinet appointments Trump has made. A Biden presidency would be far from perfect, but it would be a damn-sight better than another four years of the Trump presidency would be. Biden at least wouldn’t enjoy tearing children from their mothers and keeping them in cages the way Trump does.

I spend more time than I should fretting about this year’s presidential election. I spend too much time hoping and praying that Biden will beat Trump. Then I read Psalm 146:3: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals in whom there is no help.” And Psalm 65:5: “By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation; you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.” The lesson is pretty clear. Don’t hope in politicians, for they aren’t the solution to your problems. God is. In times of troubles like these don’t look to human rulers for solutions, look to God. God is no week read to lean on like Biden is. God is a tower of strength. God is the power behind everything that is. Humans will fail you. God never fails anyone, or doesn’t at least as long as we know what it really means for God not to fail us. If we think God has failed us it is probably because we didn’t properly understand what we can expect from God to begin with. Don’t look to mortals for salvation, look to God.

That lesson sounds straightforward enough, and it ought to ring true for every person of faith. Looking to politicians for salvation is after all a form of idolatry. No mere human brings salvation. No mere human possibly can. Only God can do it. Idols, that is, those to whom we look for salvation who are not truly God, always fall short of the ideal. They always disappoint us. In the end they always fail us. They fail us because they are mortal and therefore imperfect. Only God is perfect. Therefore only God will never fail us. Joe Biden is a fallible, mortal human being. He will fail us too, although he will do so less disastrously that Trump has and will.

I am a person of faith, and what I just said rings true for me. So why am I so reluctant to stop trusting the obviously fallible Joe Biden and start trusting God to deliver us from Donald Trump? I think it’s because of the narrow way I understand the phrase God never fails us. I want God to act directly, personally, to get Donald Trump out of our national life. Yet I have believed and said many times in person and in writing that God doesn’t act that way. I do not believe that God intervenes in the life of the world in that way. I do not believe that God is going to do what I want God to do and rid us of Donald Trump. So what do I mean when I say God never fails us?

I mean that God is always with us working with us when we do gospel work. When we work nonviolently for justice and peace we never work alone. God is always there in solidarity with us as we do God’s work in the world. When the work gets hard, when we suffer setbacks, when we’re burned out we can always turn to God in prayer for guidance, reassurance, and relief. We can say to God I need a break. I need to be done for a while, and we can know that God understands that we’re merely human. God knows better than we do that while we are called to the work we neither have to nor can do it all ourselves. God knows that we’re all at different stages of life and that we all have different gifts to bring to the work. None of us can do it all, and we don’t have to. Yet in God we can find everything we need for the work—guidance, inspiration, forgiveness when we screw up, rest when we need it. In all of these ways and probably many more as well God never fails us.

So where does that leave us? God’s not going to get rid of Donald Trump for us all on God’s own. That work is our work with God always assisting us in so many ways. Our temptation is to leave too much of the work to Joe Biden and his campaign. There’s also the temptation to rely too heavily on ourselves. We must begin the work with God’s help, but we must also hope in and rely on God for the final outcome. So let’s get on with it, relying always more on God than on any mere mortals like us or Joe Biden. May it be so.

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[1] Volodia is the familiar form of Vladimir.

No Longer Black or White?

No Longer Black or White?

Galatians 3:27-28

Saint Paul says something in his letter to the Galatians that many of us love for the way it destroys all of the sexist nonsense that keeps women out of ordained Christian ministry in so many churches. At Galatians 3:27-28 Paul says:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

So much for women can’t be ordained because Jesus was a man—or for any other reason for that matter. In Christ the distinction between women and men disappears, not because we humans are no longer men and women (thanks be to God!) but because in a mystical, metaphorical sense we are clothed in Christ. We are all one in Christ. Biological roles in human reproduction aside, even in a worldly context it rarely if ever makes sense to say men can to something but women can’t or to say women can do something but men can’t. In the church that distinction makes even less sense. In Christ there is no longer male and female, for all are one in Christ. Thanks be to God!

Now, Paul offers a couple of other human distinctions that were important in his world that mostly aren’t in ours. The distinction between Jews and Greeks means essentially nothing to us. It certainly doesn’t mean today what it meant to people of Paul’s time and place. Although tragically slavery does still exist in some parts of the world it doesn’t exist in my world. It probably doesn’t exist in yours. We needn’t concern ourselves too much with those distinctions for our purposes here.

There is however another distinction that is immensely important in the United States of America today. It occurred to me recently as I reread these verses from Galatians. It is the distinction between what we Americans call white and what we Americans call Black.[1] Racism of whites against Blacks is the defining characteristic of both American history and America today. Our history and culture are rotten to the core with it. Most of us white Americans refuse to recognize that truth. Some even expressly deny it, as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley did at the 2020 Republican National Convention. That ignorant blindness and denial in no way diminish the obvious truth. The United States of America is defined as much by its racism as it is by anything else. In the years, months, and days before I wrote this piece the unprovoked murder or attempted murder of unarmed Black people by white police officers has generated massive outcries of outrage and anger from Americans of all racial identities. For many of us white Americans our nation’s endemic racism and our complicity in it, even if only as beneficiaries, has been prominent in our minds as never before.

So Paul’s elimination of the human distinctions he mentioned from his world got me to ask whether it is also true that in our American context there is no longer Black and white. As I thought about that the question the answer to it seemed to be yes and no. As is true of American racism generally, the answer to the question of whether there is no longer Black and white turns out to be more complex than at first appears.

The yes part of the answer comes when we consider the question from a spiritual or specifically Christian point of view. As Paul said of women and men, in Christ there is no longer Black and white because all are one in Christ. Actually, from a spiritual or specifically Christian point of view all always have been one in Christ. From Christ’s perspective, which is God’s perspective, the racial distinctions we humans make just don’t exist. As much as we white Americans may think of white at the human norm with other skin shades being deviations from the norm and therefore less than the norm, there is no human racial norm. There are more Asian people in the world than there are white people of European ancestry, but that truth doesn’t make any kind of Asian the human norm any more than white is. The deepest truth about what appear to us to be racial distinctions between people is that all people without exception are created in the image and likeness of God. So from the divine perspective the answer to our question as to whether there is no longer Black and white is yes. There is no distinction between Black and white, and there never has been.

So does that mean that we Americans today may or even must go through our lives ignoring the racial differences we see between Black people and white people? Must we pretend that they don’t exist? No, absolutely not, it doesn’t mean that at all. Of course it doesn’t mean that we pay attention to racial differences so we can perpetuate racism. Not at all. Yet American racism is real. It has deep roots in American culture and American consciousness. It manifests its ugly self in numerous ways to today, in the police shootings I mentioned to be sure, but in far less obvious ways too. We can’t overcome what we don’t acknowledge, so no, we must not simply pretend that differences between Black and white don’t exist.

Racism is a complex issue. Much of American racism isn’t about individual white people hating and discriminating against individual Black people. It is far more insidious than that. It has its own demonic spiritual power that pervades all of our institutions. We see it in the statistics. Unemployment is higher among Blacks than among whites. Poverty is more widespread among Blacks than among whites. So are lack of education and medical care. The pandemic we are living through as I write these words has hit Black people harder than it has hit white people. We find it remarkable when a Black person becomes a CEO of a Fortune 500 company or President of the United States. Why? Because we’ve been conditioned by our racist culture to think deep in our psyches, perhaps below the level of consciousness, that Black people aren’t good enough to rise that high.

We see American institutional racism most clearly and perhaps most appallingly in our criminal law system. The disparity in prosecutorial outcomes between Blacks and whites is so great that I refuse to call it the criminal justice system as so many people. do. It produces very little justice. Black criminal defendants are convicted at a higher rate than are white defendants. When convicted Black defendants consistently receive harsher sentences than do white defendants for the same crime. So many young Black men spend time in prison that in some Black communities a young man spending time in prison is just a normal and expected part of life. Black imprisonment is so common that it has been called the new Jim Crow. Systemic racism infects our criminal law system profoundly and insidiously. It is one of the primary expressions of systemic racism among us. We will never overcome that tragic truth by pretending that it doesn’t exist or by pretending that we don’t see race. We must address racism precisely as having to do with race. We must all learn the statistics that show disparate outcomes between Blacks and whites in every aspect of our society. We whites must learn what it is to live Black in America as a victim of systemic racism.

Here’s an example of how that systemic racism works. In a seminary class that had both Black and white students the professor asked the students to describe how they would react if a police officer knocked on their door. The white students said they would wonder what was going on and about how they could help the police. The Black students said they’d be horribly frightened, would pray that the police would not be violent, and wonder who was going to be arrested for something they didn’t do. Those different reactions to the presence of the police are the products of institutional racism. They result from the difference between privileged white life in America and oppressed Black life in America. Both responses were authentic. Both responses were honest. They show us how far we still have to go to overcome racism in our country.

How would someone who denied the reality of American racism explain those different Black and white experiences of the police? It’s hard for me to say because I see them as results of racism. Perhaps in order to maintain their stance of denying the reality of racism those white folks who do not understand the responses as results of racism would dismiss the Black students’ responses as unauthentic, as made up, as being only what the Black students thought the white students wanted to hear or what the Black students wanted them to hear. Whatever the grounds are that white racism deniers use to dismiss the reality of racism among us, that denial is a huge obstacle in the way of overcoming racism. You can’t overcome what you won’t admit is real. We will never overcome American racism until we white Americans stop denying the reality of American racism.

So is there no longer Black and white among us? Yes and no. Race matters not at all to God. In God’s eyes all people are equal. But if we mere humans are ever to overcome racism we must recognize the profound and destructive effects racism has had and does have on American life. We don’t do that by ignoring race. We must look racism squarely in they eye, recognize it for the evil that it is, and find every new ways of resisting and overcoming it. May it be so.

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[1] I use “white” and “Black” that way intentionally to honor the way Black Americans often identify themselves. We needn’t lift up white by capitalizing it.

Resist!

Resist!

I hear people all the time saying we need to get over the division in the country. We need to get beyond the nastiness, the name calling, the intolerance. We need to be civil and treat each other with respect. Well I am here to disagree. The right wing of the American political culture and the Republican Party have gone so far over the edge that civility and respect are impossible. Defending the Trump administration is simply incomprehensible. There is absolutely no justification for it. Our current political culture calls for polemic not civil discourse. It calls for condemnation not respect. It calls for courageous truth-telling. Let me explain.

It used to be true in this country that there were two more or less respectable political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. Let me use, of all people, Richard Nixon as an example. I have despised Richard Nixon my whole life. As I was growing up our best family friend had grown up in southern California and had experienced Nixon’s first run for Congress in which he told lie after lie about a very good Democratic opponent. I learned to hate Nixon from that family friend. It surprised me not at all to learn that Nixon kept an enemies list, that he tried to use the IRS against his political opponents, or that he lied and lied about his involvement in Watergate. Yet I have to concede that compared to today’s Republicans Nixon’s actual policies were not that bad, or at least not all of them were. If I recall correctly, Nixon signed the legislation creating the EPA and OSHA. He negotiated with the Soviets. He recognized the People’s Republic of China, a necessary move that could have made US-Chinese relations better than they are. He was of course absolutely horrible about the Vietnam War. In the 1968 presidential election lied and lied about having a secret plan to end it. His only plan was more violence and international war crimes by expanding the destruction to uninvolved countries. He did however eventually recognize that we could not win the war and dummied up a supposed peace that got us out of the fighting and left the corrupt South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese Communists. Nixon then was a very mixed bag, very bad on some things but actually not bad at all on others. I didn’t think Gerald Ford was that bad either. I actually supported his pardon of Nixon because I feared what a prosecution of Nixon would do to the country. He did, after all, still have his supporters. I voted for Ford in 1976.

Fast forward to 1980. This country made the bad movie actor Ronald Reagan president. Some Americans claim he was one of our best presidents. Actually he was one of our worst. He and his minions in Congress revised the tax code to benefit the wealthy and screw the rest of us. He created what was then the biggest budget deficit in American history. People say he brought down the USSR. He didn’t. Internal contradictions and inadequacies brought down the USSR. Trust me. I lived there for a year. I saw those contradictions and inadequacies up close. Reagan just happened to be US President when the disintegration of the USSR began. Reagan knew about the AIDS crisis and intentionally ignored it leading to the deaths of God only know how many people. Reagan and Reaganomics made greed and neglect of the poor respectable. Reagan engaged in irresponsible rhetoric about nations he didn’t like—the USSR, Iran, North Korea—thereby making any improvement in the world situation much more difficult. Reagan wasn’t one of our best presidents. He was a disaster.

Things didn’t get better with his Republican successors. George H. W. Bush was perhaps not too bad, but his son George W. Bush continued Reagan's disastrous economic policies and was an international war criminal when he started an unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq. He ran up enormous budget deficits and let Wall Street get so out of control that at the end of his second term the economy collapsed, giving us what was at the time the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. It took the wisdom of the Democrats to pull us out of it. Democrat Barack Obama wasn’t perfect by a long shot. He believed in absurd American exceptionalism as much as the Republicans did, but he wasn’t nearly as disastrous as Reagan and the Bushes had been.

He was however succeeded by Donald Trump, easily the most disrespectable, despicable, incompetent, and destructive president this country has ever had. It’s not just that Trump pursues destructive policies, though he does. He and his minions have cut taxes for the wealthy even more than Reagan did. He has run up enormous budget deficits. He has undone or attempted to undo all of the Democrats’ environmental regulations that did at least something to address the existential crisis of global warming. He cozies up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Perhaps worst of all he has thoroughly botched the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic resulting in at least tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

His policies are disasters, but he’s an even worse human being than he is a politician. He his personally immoral. He brags about “grabbing women by the pussy” with no concern at all for consent. He has affairs with porn stars and Playboy models while he’s married to other women. He calls white supremacists fine people. On top of all that he lies and lies and lies. People who have kept count say he has already lied something like twenty thousand times since he’s been in office. He has no concern whatsoever for the truth. He does not operate within the categories of truth and falsity. He operates only with the categories of what he thinks is good for him politically and what he thinks is bad for him politically. He uses federal law enforcement forces like fascist black shirts. He doesn’t read anything including his daily intelligence briefings but gets most of his information from the dissemblers of Fox News. He welcomes support from the followers of the insane conspiracy theory Qanon. There is a great risk that he will not accept the results of the November presidential election this year and cause a constitutional crisis by refusing to leave the White House and claiming he actually won when he loses. He is the worst president of my lifetime, and whoever the second worst president is isn’t even close to him in incompetence, immorality, and despicability.

There simply is no justification for Donald Trump. Any attempt to defend him only proves that the person who makes the attempt is ignorant, bigoted, and concerned only with him or her self. There simply is no avoiding that conclusion. Any other conclusion simply ignores the obvious and undeniable facts. Yet people want me to treat defenders of Donald Trump with civility and respect. I’m sorry, no. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

Here’s why not. Sexual aggression against women is illegal, immoral, and indefensible. Trump brags of it. Racism and white supremacy are despicable sins that corrupt the core of our society. Trump is a racist who calls white supremacists fine people. The legitimate function of government is at least to care about if not for all of the country’s people. Trump gives not one good God damn about anyone except his wealthy supporters. Organized crime causes immense harm to innocent people. Trump functions more like a mafia don than like a president of all the people. The United States of America has always at least claimed to stand for freedom and democracy, not that it always has. Trump works to undermine the electoral process and prefers to cozy up to dictators than cooperate with our traditional democratic allies. He pulls us out of international agreements intended to protect the environment and preserve peace in the Middle East. The United States Constitution isn’t perfect, but it at least guarantees significant civil liberties including the right to vote. Trump neither understands the Constitution nor gives a damn about what it says. He violates his oath to protect and defend the Constitution at every turn. The list of Trump’s transgressions and outrages could go on and on.

Here’s the unavoidable conclusion. Donald Trump is not a traditional American politician with whom I just happen to disagree on policy issues. He is a sinful, despicable human being. He is a disaster as a politician. He is a true threat to our constitutional system of government because he doesn’t believe in it. He threatens the world order, that has avoided a third world war for the last seventy-five years, by damaging our relationships with our allies and making friends with murderous dictators. He models grossly immoral personal behavior as reasonable and acceptable. He gives our children the model of one who lies prolifically to get his own way as though that were morally acceptable.

Donald Trump is not a traditional American politician with whom I happen to disagree about policy. He is an American fascist. He wants to be a dictator. He wants to rule not through our constitutional system but by executive fiat. He despises women, people, of color, and the poor. He mocks people with disabilities. He tears children away from their parents and keeps them in cages. He tears parents away from children and deports them back to countries where they are unsafe and impoverished. He calls immigrants rapists and murderers. He stokes unjustified fear of immigrants as a way of manipulating his base just like Hitler stoked thoroughly unjustified fear of the Jews. Donald Trump is a radical departure from and the debasement of the norms of American political life. There is no denying that truth There is no defending him.

Yet this country is full of people who do defend him, and I hear people saying I should communicate with them with respect and civility. To that request I simply say no. Our current political situation with Donald Trump as president does not call for civility and respect for those who defend the indefensible. It calls for our most energetic, consistent, and truth-based resistance. It calls for the most vociferous, forceful, truth-based attacks on Trump and his supporters that we can muster. It calls for all true Americans to condemn both him and them for advocating and implementing the despicable, sinful, and indefensible as acceptable policy. European fascism killed tens of millions of people in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It was evil there and then. American fascism with its Fuhrer Donald Trump hasn’t gotten nearly as brutal as Nazism was—yet. It is nonetheless fascism. It is fascism in the American context. Civility and respect were not the way to respond to Mussolini or Hitler. They are not the way to respond to Trump and his supporters either. I do not want to be unified with them. I will not be reconciled with them. I will not accept them in our political mix.

So again I say to those of you who call for civility and respect: No. That is not what is called for now. That is not what we need now. We need assertive, aggressive, uncompromising resistance. The Germans didn’t resist Hitler. They bought his hatred and his lies. Their country and the world paid a horrific price as a result. We cannot make their mistake. No, we don’t have an Auschwitz—yet. We must do everything we can to make sure we never do. Civility and respect are not part of how we do that. So once again I say to requests for civility and respect no. And not just no, but hell no!