On Confession

 

This is the text of a meditation I will deliver this evening at the Ash Wednesday service at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Bellevue, Washington.

On Confession

Ash Wednesday

February 22, 2023

First Congregational Church of Bellevue, United Church of Christ

Rev. Tom Sorenson

 

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 rock and our redeemer. Amen.

 

We, or at least most of us, are United Church of Christ people. I am sure there is a diversity of opinion among us, as there should be. Still, on the whole, we tend to be quite liberal, progressive Christians. Here’s a truth about folk like us that I learned way back when I was in seminary. UCC people do not like to talk about sin, and they don’t like to do confession. When I was a seminary intern at Prospect UCC in Seattle, the people would not let their pastor include a confession piece in their weekly worship service. They said that they were good people and didn’t have anything to confess. They were good people. They were however not perfect people. No one is. They did have things to confess. We all do. We delude ourselves if we think we don’t.

Now, I grant you that the Christian tradition has historically stressed sin far too much. Christians have said for ages that the human problem is sin and that what we need is forgiveness. It’s not that sin isn’t a problem for us; and yes, we do need forgiveness. Christianity has overdone that part of the faith, but that doesn’t mean that awareness of sin and the need for forgiveness aren’t part of the faith. They are.

Why are they? I don’t think it’s because God won’t forgive us unless we confess our sin. I believe in a God of universal, unconditional love and grace who has forgiven our sin and everyone else’s even before we commit it. There is, however, still a real value in awareness of our sin and our confessing it. It simply is true that confession is a healthy spiritual practice. None of us is perfect. We all have room for improvement. I am convinced that each and every one of us has room for improvement precisely in the area of sin.

By sin I mean a couple of things. When I use the word in the singular I mean living as though we were somehow separate from God. Living without a lively awareness of the presence of God in our lives. I’ll confess that one for myself right now. When I use the word in the plural, I mean committing wrongful acts or failing to commit right acts. I’ll confess that one for myself right now too. Maybe you can confess them for yourselves as well.

When we fail to confess our sin and sins we bury them in the shadow of our psyches. There they fester and come out in unexpected and harmful ways. When we confess them we bring them out into the open. There we can see them, acknowledge that they are real, and confess them to ourselves and to God. We can clear them out of our souls. We can get them off of our hearts. We can repent. That is, we can commit ourselves to doing better in the future. When we do, we become psychologically and spiritually healthier people.

It's easy enough for us to say we have nothing to confess. It’s also easy enough for us to confess one or two little peccadillos and think we’ve done our work. True confession, however, requires more work than that. It requires inner discernment. It means taking a serious, hard look at ourselves. It takes spending time to discern what’s really going in our lives. It takes being honest with ourselves. I suppose superficial confession is better than no confession at all, but it’s not enough. To be spiritually healthy we need to go deeper. We need to discover what we’ve hidden in our psychological shadow. We’ll certainly find there things we need to confess.

Tonight we begin the liturgical season of Lent. Lent is traditionally a time of introspection, discernment, and confession. It is a time of clearing our souls so that we can walk with Jesus through the events of Holy Week, suffer with him and grieve as he suffers and dies, and only then rejoice in his glorious Resurrection on Easter. The ashes we receive tonight remind us of our mortality. They remind us of our need for confession. They remind us of our need for repentance. They remind us of our need to know God’s grace in our lives.

So whether you receive ashes this evening or not, I invite you into the holy season of Lent. I once heard a pastoral colleague say he wanted to find a way to make Lent fun. Lent is not supposed to be fun. It is supposed to solemn. It is supposed to be serious. It is supposed to be a time of preparation to experience the grief of Good Friday and the joy of Easter. I pray that each of you, and I, can experience it in that spirit this year. God’s grace is always there. There’s no question of divine condemnation here. We can however become healthier spiritual people if we take Lent seriously and do the work we are meant to do as we live through it. May it be so. Amen.

On Ignorance and Knowledge

 

On Ignorance and Knowledge

February 20, 2023

 

The Revised Common Lectionary for Sunday, February 26, 2023, the first Sunday of Lent, includes a few verses from the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden in chapters two and three of Genesis. I read those verses last night, and they got me thinking about the story of Adam and Eve in a way I never have before. I’m going to explore some of the story’s meaning in this piece. Before I do I need to confirm that I understand this story as story, as myth. It is not literally true. There never were two original people named Adam and Eve. I read it for meaning not for facts. That’s how you should read it too.

 It’s a simple enough story. The Lord God creates two earth creatures who we call Eve and Adam. God places them in an earthly paradise in the garden of Eden. God tells them that they may eat anything in the garden except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That tree stands in the center of the garden, perhaps a symbolic placement that emphasizes its importance. A tempter called only a “serpent,” not a snake, talks to Eve. It asks Eve what God has told her and Adam they could eat. Eve says we can eat of everything here except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She says God has told them that if they eat of that tree, on that day they will die. The serpent says no you won’t. It says that if they were to eat of the forbidden tree their eyes would be opened and they would be like God, knowing good and evil. Eve sees how tempting the forbidden tree and its fruit is and, it seems, is intrigued by the prospect of becoming like God. The tempter gives her the fruit from the tree. She takes it, gives some to Adam, and they both eat it. When they do their eyes are opened, but the only knowledge they seem to get is knowledge that they are both naked. They make loincloths and cover themselves. When God asks them what they have done hey confess to God that they ate the forbidden fruit. God imposes many of the common hardships of human life on them, throws them out of the Eden, and constructs an impassable barrier so they cannot return there.

Last night I got to thinking: What are the lessons here? One seems to be that we are more likely to listen to and follow the tempter than we are to follow God. Adam and Eve are prototypes of humanity, and that’s what they did. It is a common trope of traditional Christianity that it’s hard to resist temptation. Indeed, it is. I don’t mean the temptation of addiction. That’s another issue altogether. I mean the temptations to turn from God and God’s ways that the world puts before us every day. The temptation of wealth. The temptation of sex. The temptation and opportunities to use and take advantage of other people. Advertisers tell us incessantly that our number one task is looking out for number one. Surely there is at least one thing in life for every one of us that we shouldn’t do but that seems attractive. No literal serpent comes to entice us to do the wrong thing, but something inside us often does.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden is a symbol for temptation. Its fruit looks really good. Eve thinks that eating it will make her wise. The serpent tells her that God didn’t tell the truth when God said that if she ate it on that day she would die. Eve convinced herself that what was supposed to be the negative result of disobeying God’s command wouldn’t really happen. We see the serpent as the tempter in this story, but God is a tempter too. God made the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so attractive. God made the knowledge of good and evil itself so attractive. God could have made the tree ugly and not at all appetizing, but that’s not what God did. Eve and Adam are faced with a strong temptation indeed. Both Eve and Adam know what God has commanded. They violate it anyway.

What happens when they eat the forbidden fruit is that they know good and evil, but what happens at first is only that they become aware that they are naked. Why is that the first knowledge they gain in this story? The two people’s physicality is not more exposed than it had been before, but it seems that they had been unaware of it. I think the reference to nakedness here isn’t about sexual sin. It is about human physicality generally. Adam and Eve come to know that they are physical creatures. They probably also become aware that they are mortal. The couple’s awareness of their nakedness here is, I think, a symbol of who we really are, physical beings with all of the human limitations that come with being creatures of flesh and bone.

Because they did what God had told them not to do, God throws the couple out of the garden of Eden. God imposes some of the hardships of human life on them. The woman will suffer in childbirth. The man will have to till the soil and work to provide the necessities of life for both of them. We learn that gaining knowledge comes with consequences that are not always positive. God forces Adam and Eve out of the naïve paradise of the garden and into the real world. There they learn that life is hard. Adam and Eve gain knowledge, but they lose their innocence. We learn that we can be ignorant and blissful or knowing and suffering.

That is the choice life gives us. I have long thought that life must be easier for those not cursed with knowledge of how the world really is, of how people really are. There is a reason we have the phrase “blissful ignorance.” Some of us, however, are by nature curious. We want to know things. We seek answers to the questions we face. We don’t like unanswered questions. When we have one, we seek to solve it by finding the answer to it. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, that answer turns out to be something we’d rather not know. The answer doesn’t solve our existential angst, it makes it worse.

Astronomy is a good example. In ages past people were secure in the knowledge that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and other heavenly objects orbited around it. They were comfortable understanding that the universe with the earth at its center was eternal and unchanging. Today we know that none of that is true. We aren’t the center of the universe, we’re on an infinitesimal,  seemingly meaningless speck of dust orbiting a perfectly ordinary star near the outer edge of one of the arms of a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy. Our star is one of billions upon billions of stars in the universe. Our galaxy is one of a truly untold number of galaxies in the universe. We know that none of this is permanent. Our ordinary star will begin to die some day. As it does it will make the earth utterly uninhabitable. Eventually it will destroy the earth altogether. The entire universe may devolve into a static state with all its energy spent in which nothing new is happening at all. We know we aren’t protected from things like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Another asteroid could hit and kill all of us too.

This knowledge is hardly comforting. It doesn’t relieve our existential angst. If we ever think about it, it heightens that angst. We ask: What can the earth mean if it is that temporary? What can we mean if we are that temporary? Why should we bother to do anything seeing as how in the end none of what we do will even exist? Those are unavoidable questions that arise from today’s understanding of the nature of the universe. We wouldn’t have those questions if we understood the cosmos the way the ancients did. Our knowledge about the nature of the universe brings with it the negative consequence of increased existential anxiety.

So why do so many of us spend most of our lives seeking more knowledge? Why don’t the unavoidable negative consequences of much knowledge keep us from asking new questions and seeking new answers? The only reason I can think of is that God created us as curious people. It seems to be a characteristic of humanity to want to explore the unknown. To reach for an understanding of everything there is. To find unanswered questions that intrigue us and present opportunities for new discoveries. It's just human to long for more knowledge not less. We are creatures who strive to grasp things beyond ourselves. To strive to grasp even ultimate truth. What we discover in our search for more knowledge is that that knowledge often comes with increased not decreased anxiety over our lives and the meaning of our lives. We do it anyway, because doing it is part of who we are.

Adam and Eve could not return to the garden of Eden. God blocked their way back. They could not return to the naïve ignorance in which they once lived. Neither can we. You can’t unknow things you know. Moreover, we seem to be more content having knowledge with all of its negative consequences than we are living in the naïve simplicity of ignorance. Naivete seems foolish to us. For us to live in naivete we have to turn off our minds, and that is something most of us will not do. So we learn as much as we can about as many things as we can. We keep seeking more knowledge though we know new knowledge may well bring new discomfort. Adam and Eve didn’t give up when they lost their naivete. They lived full lives. They had children. They struggled with much of what human life is like. We know they did because we do. The story of Adam, Eve, and the garden is, among other things, a mythic presentation of these truths about human existence. That, I think, is why we continue to read and contemplate this very ancient story.

Faith as Trust

 

Faith as Trust

 

I have long understood faith as trust. Faith is not primarily believing things you can’t prove are true, though that is what most people in our context believe that it is. Faith as trust isn’t belief that facts are true. It is accepting and relying on the reality of the spiritual dimension of reality. All human civilizations have had an understanding of that spiritual dimension. Sometimes they have called it God. Sometimes they have called it something else. They have all, however, reached for understanding of the spiritual. They have expressed their understanding in their system of symbols and myths. The primary system of symbols and myths in my context, though certainly not the only one, is Christianity. I have accepted Christianity as I understand it as my way of comprehending the reality and the character of the spiritual dimension of all that is. That I consider my faith to be primarily trust means that I live as though I knew that what I learn of the spiritual through Christianity were objectively true though I know that I can never prove that it is. Faith as truth is a leap of faith, to use Kierkegaard’s term for it. The Christianity that I trust is my faith because I choose it as my faith.

It is perfectly legitimate for anyone to ask me: Why do that? What do you get out of it that you wouldn’t have without it? Whatever that is, aren’t you just deluding yourself that it comes from something real? Isn’t it true that you have no real reason for doing it, you’re just doing it because you want to? Aren’t you just being self-indulgent? Isn’t it still true that you do and can know nothing about this ultimate reality on which you say you rely?  Isn’t living in trust in it the same as just pretending? You can pretend any damned thing you want. Pretending doesn’t make it so.

In a way all of that is true, but here is another truth. Everyone needs a way to get through life. Life is precarious. Life is contingent. Life always includes pain and loss. Life always includes death. It is of course perfectly possible to live life superficially despite all that. It’s easy enough to avoid the hard questions about life, to live life not just not knowing all the answers but not even knowing that there are profound questions. Questions about the nature of reality, of what is real and what isn’t. Questions of how we know what is real and what isn’t. Questions about the meaning of life. It’s easy to live not even knowing that such questions exist. That’s how most people live, not knowing what they don’t know.

Yet some of us do ask the profound questions. We ask about ontology. We ask about epistemology. We ask about meaning. The post-modern existential questions really are what is real and does it mean anything at all. The easiest answers to those questions for those of us raised in a secular age is only the physical world is real, and I don’t worry about what it means. Yet that way of living is ultimately existentially damaging. It leads to one of two things, despair or unchecked hedonism. Of course, not everyone who lives this way experiences either of these things, but they don’t only because they neither think nor live their way of life to its unavoidable conclusion. Indeed, unchecked hedonism is almost certainly a vain attempt to avoid dealing with the despair that eventually comes to everyone who lives only on a superficial plain and for whom only the material is real.

Yet here’s a truth about our experience of physical reality that few people today recognize. We think physical reality is real because we experience it, but all we really have is our perception of what appears to us to be a reality outside of ourselves. We can’t prove that it is real. All we can prove is that we perceive and experience it as real. This limitation to our ability to know is existential. It comes from our nature as centered selves. From a center that we perceive to be ourself, we experience something that appears to us to be other than ourself. To live in the material world that we perceive is to choose to accept what we perceive as real, and it is to rely on the reality of that which we perceive. Even people who are totally unaware that they are making such a choice are making such a choice. Not to decide is actually itself a decision. It is the decision not to decide. Even for those who live this way, acceptance of physical reality as real is a choice.

We can also make a different choice. We can choose to accept the reality of the spiritual and live trusting in its reality. To do so is not to engage in individualistic fantasizing. It is in part reliance on one’s own experience that there is something more to everything that is than is immediately apparent, but it is also to look beyond oneself to the experience of humanity generally. We don’t need to rely on ourselves alone in our seeking to understand the true nature of reality and to find meaning in life. We have millennia of human experience to turn to and to learn from. That universal human experience says that the physical world in which we perceive ourselves to live is not all there is to reality. That universal human experience says that the physical world in which we perceive ourselves to live is not all there is to reality. It is as possible to choose to live accepting and trusting in the reality of the spiritual dimension as it is to choose to live without accepting and trusting in it. Those two choices are in fact existentially identical in that they are both choices. There is no way to avoid living in trust, trust, that is, of some understanding of reality as real. That’s what all humans do whether they know it or not. Therefore, choosing to accept and trust in the reality of the spiritual is at least as existentially justifiable as is choosing to live without the spiritual.

We all live in trust. The only questions are what we trust and what it means for us to trust it. To trust in something is to assume that it is real, but it is also more than that. It is to rely on the reality of that which we trust. Rely on it for what? Rely on it to shape the reality in which we live. Most people in my context trust only in the reality of that which they perceive as the material world. People of faith make a different choice. So do I. We choose to live in a world that is shaped by an additional dimension, the dimension of the spiritual. We people of faith believe that we gain things from our choice that the other possible existential choice cannot give us, and, if we’re honest, we concede that we are indeed making a choice about which world we will live in.

So is it self-indulgent to trust in the reality of the spiritual? In a sense yes, but only in the sense that any decision about what to trust as ultimate reality is self-indulgent. The choice of what to trust as ultimate reality is unavoidably self-indulgence. Whether we know we’re doing it or not, no one can avoid making a decision about what to accept and trust as the ultimate truth. In our secular, western culture it is actually easier to accept and trust in physical reality alone than it is to accept and trust spiritual reality. The dominant culture of North America in which I live and from which I write was formed by the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Those profound historical developments produced a culture in which the findings of science are accepted as true. Our culture accepts as true that to which human reason leads us whether through the methodology of science or through rational thought alone. Our culture predisposes us toward choosing only the material as real.

To choose to accept and trust in the spiritual is countercultural. I don’t mean a superficial choice to call oneself a Christian or some other type of person of faith. Most Americans probably still do that. I mean to accept and trust in the reality of the spiritual with all of one’s being—body, mind, and spirit. Not to give a faith tradition lip service but really to live into it. To understand its teachings. To understand its history. To critique both its teachings and its history in a way that makes it more true to its real nature than faith traditions usually are, Christianity perhaps least of all. Few people in my culture ever accept and trust in the spiritual at that depth, yet only accepting the spiritual at that depth truly makes it real for us. Only accepting the spiritual at that level truly leads us to shaping our reality on the basis of what we trust is true of the spiritual. Doing that is what faith truly is. It isn’t mere acceptance of alleged facts as true. It is choosing to devote one’s whole self to living with the reality of the spiritual in trust that what one understands of the spiritual does not deceive. Very few if any of us ever do that perfectly. I know I certainly don’t. But it is still true that faith is trust. Deep trust. Existential trust. This is a truth I try, rarely very successfully, to live into. Christianity would be truer to its true self, and it would avoid the negative conclusions so many people draw from it, if more people understood faith as trust.

I Hope Meacham Is Right

 

I Hope Meacham Is Right

February 10, 2023

 

I just finished reading Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America, The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House, New York, 2018). It came out the year after Donald Trump became president. Meacham presents the book as a response to Trump, though he rarely mentions Trump by name. On page 13 writes, "I am writing now not because past American presidents have always risen to the occasion but because the incumbent American president so rarely does so.” Meacham’s thesis is that American history has been a constant struggle between what is good in America and what is bad. He says the bad times don’t last. He says we survive periods of bad presidents and bad circumstances and always come out all right on the other side. He writes, I guess, to tell us that we’ll survive Donald Trump and MAGA too. I hope he’s right.

For most of the time I was reading the book I thought Meacham was being too rosy. I thought he was gliding over some important negative facts from our history and making that history sound better than it is. He doesn’t condemn several presidents the way he should. He doesn’t point out that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. He mentions Andrew Jackson relocating Native Americans, but he doesn’t damn him as the genocidal white supremacist that he was. He doesn’t mention the Trail of Tears. He likes Teddy Roosevelt a lot, but he never mentions Roosevelt’s warmongering and love of American imperial expansion. He doesn’t damn TR for these things the way he should. He says Woodrow Wilson permitted the segregation of the federal civil service. He doesn’t say Wilson initiated it, which he did. Meacham never discusses Wilson’ deep racism or condemn him for it.[1] When he tries to explain why millions of Americans joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, he sounds like he’s making excuses for them. He doesn’t condemn them  for joining a terrorist organization founded on hate. He heaps praise on Lyndon Johnson for Johnson’s courageous stand on civil rights and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Fair enough. Johnson did a lot to advance the cause of civil rights in this country. But Meacham spends very little time on how Johnson’s disastrous Vietnam policy destroyed his legacy. He mentions Richard Nixon but doesn’t mention Watergate. On a broader issue, he doesn’t mention American institutional racism at all much less analyze it or suggest how we might overcome it. He certainly doesn’t ignore American racism, but he doesn’t paint its history as being as horrific as it is nor does he get its nature as central to American culture right.

It's interesting that in a couple of passages in which Meacham is clearly attacking Trump he doesn’t use Trump’s name. I cited what he says on page 13 above. There’s no mention of Trump’s name there. The book’s Index listing for Trump directs the reader to page 266. There Meacham refers to today as “a time when a president of the United States appears determined to undermine the rule of law, a free press, and the hope essential to American life." True, but there’s no mention of Trump here. Meacham’s book holds out hope that we will survive Trump. Meacham certainly could, however, have made his criticism of Trump much more explicit and much more pointed than he did. Maybe that’s because he is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and is a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize winning author. Whatever his reason, his attack on Trump is far more muted than it needed to be.

Is Meacham right that America’s better angels always survive the bad times and reassert themselves? I suppose he is. The country survived the Civil War more or less, though we’re still struggling with its aftermath. We're still here, and in some ways we are a better nation than we have been in the past. We have, however, never atoned for slavery. We have never atoned for our genocide of Native Americans. We have never atoned for our imperial expansion across North America and beyond into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Racism remains deeply embedded in American culture and American life. Explicit expressions of racism may not be as socially acceptable as they once were, but racism is if anything more insidious when it is silent the way institutional racism is. Meacham addresses none of these issues central to American history in this book.

Is Meacham right that we’ll survive Donald Trump and the MAGA movement? There is reason to hope that we will. Trump did, after all, lose the 2020 presidential election. Yet neither he nor his fascistic movement have disappeared from American life. Trump is running for election again in 2024. So is governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who may be more dangerous than Trump because he is as culturally reactionary but comes across as less deranged than Trump does. Millions upon millions of Americans still want Trump to be president. Do they want him to be the tyrant he wants to be? It’s hard to see how they don’t since they keep supporting him and believing his lies when his aspiration to tyranny is obvious to anyone who will just look at the truth. At one point in the book Meacham acknowledges the threat of a tyrant ruling not against the people but with the people. As long as Trump, Trumpists, and MAGA are still alive in our country, that threat is very real.

Meacham is trying to be a reassuring voice of calm and hope in a time of great stress and danger for our country. That could be a good thing, but I fear that it may lull us into complacency about the threat Donald Trump and his ilk still pose to American democracy. Our better angels prevail only when enough Americans refuse to give in to our worse angels, the ones that rule so much of the country even today after Trump is out of office. If Meacham right about hope for the future? I hope so. I wish I were more convinced that he is.

---

[1] When I graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970 I was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. It was an award granted to graduating senior who intended to pursue graduate studies. When I was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow I didn’t know what a racist Wilson had been. In 2020 the Woodrow Wilson Foundation changed its name to The Institute for Citizens and Scholars. They ditched the name Woodrow Wilson because Wilson was such a racist.

On Deuteronomic Bullshit

 

On Deuteronomic Bullshit

February 6, 2023

 

I suppose I’ve thought it, but I don’t think I’ve ever said it to anyone else before. In a clergy lectionary group I participate in we were looking this morning at the Revised Common Lectionary readings for February 12, 2023. The first of those readings is from Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is styled as Moses talking to the Hebrew people as they are about to cross the Jordan River and enter Canaan after their time in the desert fleeing Egypt. The lectionary reading we looked at includes these lines:

 

If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away, and you do not hear but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. Deuteronomy 30:16-18.

 

This is the distinctive theology of Deuteronomy. Obey every last one of Yahweh’s commandments, but most especially don’t worship anyone else, and you will love long and prosper. If you don’t obey all of Yahweh’s commandments, and most especially if you ever worship anyone else, it’s going to go very badly for you. Elsewhere Deuteronomy has long lists of earthly blessings the people will receive if they do what Moses tells them to do and long lists of the earthly curses that will befall them if they don’t.

This morning another of the members of my lectionary group was trying to make something good out these verses and another verse included in the reading, verse 19. It reads in part, “choose life.” OK. Yes, we should choose life over death, but Deuteronomy means by choose life obey all of Yahweh’s commandments. It says that if we do our lives will be beds of roses but will be hell on earth if we don’t. I said to the group, “That’s the foundational theology of Deuteronomy, and its bullshit.” I suppose that as an ordained Christian clergyperson I should be ashamed that I called part of the Bible bullshit, but let’s face it. The Bible is full of bullshit. It’s also full of divine wisdom, but that wisdom is all intermingled with a lot of bullshit. Deuteronomy is Exhibit A in the case against the Bible that it’s full of bullshit.

Deuteronomy’s theology that says do what God want you to do and you will live out the Vulcan blessing “live long and prosper,” but don’t do what God wants you to do and you’re gonna get it big time is bullshit because life just doesn’t work that way. No clear headed assessment of life can possibly conclude that it does. Do the saints of the world always live long and prosper? Hell no they don’t. Often they get assassinated, sometimes at a very young age. Because their lives are not all about making money, they often live materially modestly at best and often in true poverty. The world often scorns them as do-gooder weaklings. Do rank sinners fail materially in life? Do they always die young? I’ll say just two words in answer to that question: Donald Trump.

Deuteronomic theology has had dire consequences in the Christian tradition. It may well have cost more people their faith than any other theology. It has led people to believe that if they live right, have strong faith, and pray hard enough, life will go well for them and their loved ones. Bad things won’t happen to them. It has led far too many pastors (and one is too many) to tell people to pray for an ill loved one and the loved one won’t die. When the loved one does die, as we all will one day, far too many pastors have said to the survivor, “Well, your faith wasn’t strong enough. You didn’t pray hard enough.”

If that’s not bullshit, I don’t know what is. There at least two tragic failings in it. First, like I just said, life doesn’t work that way. Bad things happen to everyone. They’re part of life. We’re all mortal. No amount of believing and praying is going to keep anyone alive forever. Telling people they can live long and prosper if they believe fervently enough and pray hard enough is lying to them. It is so obvious that it isn’t true. Yes, the person to whom a pastor tells this lie may live long and prosper. But if they do it's not because of their faith and their fervent prayers. It’s a delusion if they think that it is.

Second, this demonic theology makes bad things that happen to a person or to a person’s loved ones the person’s own fault. It says to a grieving widow, your husband died because you aren’t a good enough Christian. Your faith wasn’t strong enough. You didn’t pray hard enough. Far too many pastors (and one is too many) have laid that guilt trip on grieving people so they can hold onto their horribly defective theology. If their doing that isn’t bullshit, once again I don’t know what is.

There is a book in the Bible that calls bullshit on Deuteronomy. It’s the book of Job. In that book God allows Satan, more a tempter or accuser here than actually the devil, to inflict horrific loss on Job, a man who truly had done well in life. The story says, and for the story to make its point we have to accept, that Job was perfectly righteous. He was the perfect Jew. He obeyed all of the Torah law. He couldn’t understand why he had lost all of his property and his children and become horribly ill himself. He’d been fed Deuteronomy all his life, or so we must assume. He thought suffering was a consequence of wrongdoing. He knew he had done no wrong, so his suffering made no sense to him. He thought God had made a mistake about him. He thought that if he could talk to God fact to face he could convince God of God’s error. Job has “friends” who tell him he must have sinned. His suffering was proof that he had. Confess, they tell him, and it will go better for you. Job says no, I have not sinned. I have nothing to confess. Both Job and his friends have bought Deuteronomy hook, line, and sinker. They all believe that if you suffer it’s your own damned fault unless God has made some mistake about you.

Near the end of the book God appears. God talks to Job out of a whirlwind. God says to Job, in effect, who the hell are you to question me? I’m God, you’re not. Deal with it. God does not deny responsibility for Job’s suffering, but God calls bullshit on Deuteronomy. God says to Job, in effect, you Deuteronomists are just wrong. Shit happens. It’s not always your fault. God doesn’t affirm either Job or his friends. He tells them, in effect, that they have understood the dynamics of suffering all wrong. Deuteronomy, God says in effect, gets the dynamics of suffering all wrong. Deal with it! Deuteronomy is bullshit!

When I took my first call as a parish pastor, my wife of nearly thirty years was dying of breast cancer. Not long before she died I preached a sermon on the subject of this blog post. I didn’t swear from the pulpit. Church people tend not to like that. Instead, I called the claim that you can avoid suffering and death by having a strong enough faith and praying hard enough a “demonic lie.” I said it’s a lie because it isn’t true, and it’s obvious to anyone who will just open their eyes that it isn’t true. It’s demonic because of all the harm it causes to innocent people. I was right then. I’m right now.

So let’s be done with Deuteronomy’s bullshit. Let’s understand that shit happens even to the most innocent of all people. After all, Jesus suffered horribly and died nailed to a cross. Let’s understand that the purpose of faith and prayer is to strengthen our connection with a God who goes through everything we go through with us as our rock and comforter. It’s not to get God to do something God wouldn’t otherwise do. I don’t know why Deuteronomy says what it says. Maybe it was to give priests power over the people as the ones to tell people whether they were doing enough to get on God’s good side or not. Whatever the reasons behind it were, the basic theology of Deuteronomy is bullshit, and that’s all there is to it.

The Tragedy of Today's Republican Party

 

The Tragedy of Today’s Republican Party

February 5, 2023

 

They still call it the Grand Old Party. I’ve never quite understood what was supposed to be grand about it, but it’s had that name for a long time, and people still use it, almost always as just by its initials with the definite article, the GOP. It began as the party of Abraham Lincoln, who was the first Republican president. There have been numerous Republican presidents since then. Of them only Teddy Roosevelt has been worth much, and he was quite problematic in his own ways. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t too bad. Richard Nixon was of course the crook that he claimed not to be and one of the worst presidents in American history. Ronald Reagan was a disaster that we haven’t recovered from yet. George H. W. Bush was mediocre, which makes him good by Republican standards. His son George W. Bush was another Republican disaster, basically a war criminal for starting an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq. Today, the Republican Party has come completely off the rails. It is now the party of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Kevin McCarthy, world class obstructionist Mitch McConnell, and other perfectly deplorable political types. Then there are Republicans that make that clown car look relatively innocuous by comparison. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Exhibit B: Matt Gaetz. Exhibit C: George Santos.

In 2016 the Republican Party sold its soul, such as it was, to Donald Trump, a showman and shyster who gives not one good God damn for anyone but himself or for anything other than his sexual gratification and the size of the fortune he claims to have. He won the 2016 presidential election. He didn’t win the popular vote. His Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton did. The American federal system, however, gives disproportionate power to small population states. Trump won enough of them to win the electoral college vote and become president though a majority of American voters had chosen someone else. Trump and his enablers went on to a disastrous four-year administration that the country barely survived. Trump behaved so badly that he was impeached not once but twice. Only a purely political vote in the Senate and the requirement of a two-thirds vote to convict kept Trump from being convicted, removed from office, and barred from ever holding federal office again.

Trump ran for reelection in 2020. Once again he lost the popular vote. This time he also lost the electoral college vote. On election night, when it was clear that he had lost, Trump claimed that he had actually won the election by a lot. Thereafter he tried every legal trick (and some illegal ones) to overturn the result of a free and fair election that he had lost. He and his minions lost court cases that sought to change the result of the election something like sixty times. Some of his minions in some of the swing states he had lost dummied up false papers claiming the be their state’s electors when they weren’t and submitted them to the federal government. It escapes me how that cannot be a crime. Everything he tried failed, and it was obvious from the outset that they would fail because they were all frivolous at best and illegal at worst. It remains to be seen how many criminal indictments will come from these efforts and whether or not Trump himself will be indicted.

Then came January 6, 2021. That was the day Congress was to meet in joint session to fulfill its constitutional duty of confirming the electoral college vote. I’ll give just the broad outline of the events of that day. Every American who has paid even passing attention to the news knows what happened. In short, Trump and his fellow travelers, including the once respected Rudy Giuliani, whipped a crowd into a frenzy, then sent them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the US Capitol. They stormed the building, overwhelmed the Capitol police, broke in en masse, and threatened the life of every person legitimately in the building. Among those persons was Vice President Pence. The insurrectionists hated him especially because he wouldn’t go along with Trump’s demand that he use his position as president of the Senate to throw out enough electoral votes to give Trump a majority and thus the presidency. Some rioters had erected a makeshift gallows outside the Capitol. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” Thank God Pense, otherwise a thoroughly despicable, homophobic, right-wing politician, had the integrity not even to try to do what Trump wanted him to do.

The purpose of the insurrectionist mob that invaded the Capitol was to prevent Congress from making Joe Biden president by keeping it from confirming the electoral college vote. They managed to delay the vote though not keep it from happening. After a delay of several hours Congress reconvened and carried out its constitutional duty, though an appalling number of Republicans voted against certifying the election’s clearly legitimate outcome. Today, more than two years later, Trump (for inexplicable reasons not yet indicted for his numerous crimes) continues to claim that he actually won the 2020 election and that nefarious people somewhere, somehow, stole his victory from him.

Unfortunately, today Trump is not the only prominent Republican loon. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is getting a great deal of publicity pursuing a culturally reactionary policy that seeks not only to stop the progress of this country but to reverse it. He has a fetish about cross-dressers, making drag shows a particular target of his attacks. He has prohibited the teaching of the broad range of human sexuality in public schools with his “Don’t say gay” law. He wants to enclose the country’s horrendous history of racism in a cone of silence so today’s students will never learn about it. If they did, they might be able both to combat it and to see the dire necessity of doing so, something no white supremacist could tolerate. He is an anti-vax fanatic. There’s not way to know how many Floridians have died unnecessarily as a result of his lunatic campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines, but it surely must be a very substantial number. Despite all of that, it appears that this whack job may be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2024 if Trump doesn’t stage a comeback and claim the nomination for himself.

DeSantis isn’t the only one. Tragically, the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 election. It’s a very thin majority, but it’s still a majority. They made the thoroughly despicable Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House. To get that position, for which he has lusted for years, McCarthy had to make Lord knows what promises to the truly insane members of the Republican caucus. I’ll mention just three of those crazies. Matt Gaetz of Florida is a right-wing extremist under investigation for sexual misconduct with a minor. George Santos, newly elected from New York, has told so many lies that he almost makes Donald Trump look honest, and that takes a lot of doing.

Then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. She is a prime example of the insanity of the extremist wing of the already extremist Republican Party. She pushes Q-Anon conspiracy theories. She praises violent insurrectionists. She once called for the death of prominent Democratic politicians. She has promoted anti-Jewish and white supremacist conspiracy theories. She has likened the Democrats to Nazis. I’m no psychologist, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t lost contact with reality could say the things she says. Yet the voters of her Georgia district reelected her in 2022, and the other Republicans in Congress either support her or at least tolerate her.

The Republican majority in the House has no constructive agenda whatsoever. They threaten to refuse to raise the federal debt limit unless the Democrats agree to extreme cuts in Social Security and Medicare, never mind that we all pay for those benefits every time we get a paycheck or make a quarterly estimated tax deposit. Never mind that American public opinion strongly supports those federal programs. Never mind that those programs have their own source of funding, namely, our FICA payments, and have nothing to do with the national debt. These Republican legislators, if we can still call them that, plan to waste large amounts of governmental time and money investigating bogus charges that the Department of Justice has acted against Republicans for political reasons. They have no interest in actually governing. They just want to play to the deluded Republican base and keep various kinds of political BS alive and in the news so they can hold onto power.

The Republican loons at the national level have cohorts in many of the states. There is a type of Republican these days called an election denier. These are people who have bought Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election in a landslide but his victory somehow got stolen from him, or at least in public they support that lie. One of them was nearly elected governor of Arizona in 2022. A few of them have been elected secretary of state in various places, a position that puts them in charge of elections in their state. I can hardly imagine the trouble they will cause in future elections. I’m sure they will do whatever they can to disrupt that democratic process and get their preferred whack job candidates elected when the people of their state actually elect someone else.

Before I close I need to say that I know that there are still some decent people who are Republicans. One is Representative Carolyn Eslick, my neighbor in Sultan, Washington, who represents the Washington state legislative district where I live. I disagree with Carolyn’s politics, and she knows it. She is, however, a truly decent person doing what she believes is best for the people of Washington state. I disagree with her about what that is, but I like her as a person. So don’t get me wrong. I know that there still are some decent people who support traditional Republican policies of low taxes and small government.

Nonetheless, the state of the Republican Party at the national level and in many of the states is a true national tragedy. The leading national Republican politicians are all nuts. They are interested only in holding onto power and persecuting their political opponents in every way they can. The believe lie after lie. They may say in private that they know how bad Donald Trump really is, but in public they will not denounce him and work to distance their party from him. DeSantis may be even more dangerous than Trump. His policies are horrific, but he doesn’t come across as nearly as deranged as Trump does. He might therefore be able to inflict even more damage on the nation and the world than Trump could.

It is a political commonplace that the American political system needs two respectable political parties that advocate different policies and can compete honestly for the votes of the American people. We used to have two such parties, more or less. The Republican Party of Nelson Rockefeller and others of his ilk was nothing like the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Today we have one traditionally respectable political party, the Democrats, and one political party that has lost all credibility and claim to legitimacy, the Republican Party. Will the Republican Party ever recover from its current deplorable state? In his book The Soul of America historian Jon Meacham says that our country has survived and recovered from the many times when our lesser angels have seemed to be in control. I hope he’s right. Today, lesser angels are very much in control of the Republican party. Either that party must regain its bearings or it must be replaced by a new party not controlled by and beholden to lunatics the way the Republican party is today. I guess we’ll see what happens.