On Despair and Hope

 

On Despair and Hope

 

I spend a lot of time in despair over the state of the world. There’s a nearly endless list of reasons why I do. Here’s some of that list. There is violence everywhere. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has his nation, Russia, invade the neighboring nation of Ukraine with nearly all of the military might at his disposal (though mercifully, so far at least, not the nuclear part of it), and the Ukrainians fight back with everything they’ve got and everything the West will give them. There’s civil war in the Sudan and Yemen. A violent military regime rules Myanmar (Burma). Drug gangs kill at will in Columbia and Mexico. The US Supreme Court reads the “well-regulated militia” clause out of the Second Amendment, and gun violence pervades American life as the American psychosis over guns continue unabated. Most Americans say they support so-called reasonable gun laws, but what we need to do is get rid of the damned guns; and almost no one is willing to do that.

My country has become militarized to an appallingly frightening extent. Yes, I guess Americans have always idolized the military to some extent. But I came of age during the protests against the illegal, immoral American war on Vietnam. We sure didn’t idolize the US military as we chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” As we sang “Where have all the flowers gone?” and “One, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam,”  and “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.” As we damned Lieutenant Calley and others for the Mi Lai massacre. As we condemned the National Guard for killing students at Kent State University. As we cheered draft dodgers who fled to Canada to avoid serving in the US military in that inexcusable war. I sure didn’t idolize the US Army when I flunked the physical for induction and celebrated, knowing I would not have to go to Southeast Asia and perhaps never come home alive. No. We sure as hell didn’t idolize the US military then.

It's all different today. Every time we meet someone who is in the military or who ever has been we’re expected to say “Thank you for your service,” as though only those in the military serve. Why don’t we say that to nurses and teachers? But we don’t. No, we just glorify the killing machine. We don’t sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” any more during the seventh inning stretch of baseball games. We sing “God Bless America,” adding another layer of nationalistic BS to our singing of the national anthem at the beginning of the game. We say we’ve stationed our military all over the world “to defend our freedom.” Bullshit! That is not what they’re doing. They’re projecting American power to defend our country’s supposed political and economic interests around the world, not to defend our freedom, which no foreign force can threaten but domestic forces threaten all the time.  We spend nearly as much on our military as every other nation in the world combined spends on theirs, and we think we need to do it to defend our national security. Once again, Bullshit! All that spending on our military doesn’t make us safer. If anything it makes people around the world angry enough at us to conduct terrorist attacks against us. This country has lost all touch with reality in the way it idolizes the military.

Totalitarian dictators constrict people’s freedoms and distort their lives all over the world. In Russia, Putin has recreated as much of Stalinist totalitarianism as today’s conditions will permit. Kim Jong-un has created an abhorrent caricature of a human society in North Korea, the horrors of which most of us can’t even imagine, and he has armed it with nuclear weapons. Xi Jinping has had himself named essentially dictator of China for life as he rules over a country with a more or less capitalist economy (not that capitalism is great, but at least it’s better than a Soviet-style planned economy) but no political or cultural freedom whatsoever. The Taliban oppresses the Afghan people, most especially Afghan women, and they do it out of an absurd caricature of Islamic faith. Authoritarian theocrats oppress the people of Iran. The Saud family does the same with the people of Saudi Arabia. President Assad does the same in Syria, where he and his opponents have plunged the country into endless years of violent civil war in which both Russia and the US have felt compelled to meddle militarily. There are authoritarian and totalitarian governments elsewhere all over the world from Turkmenistan to Venezuela  and elsewhere.

In the US we used to have two more or less legitimate political parties. Yes, for decades the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow racial segregation in the South and the Republicans advocated policies that benefited only the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us and enacted those policies when they could. Yet, except for Jim Crow laws and actions aimed at keeping Black Americans from voting in the years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 neither of those parties was ever actively anti-democratic. Today the Republican Party is no longer the legitimate if unreasonably conservative political party it used to be. It is the party of Donald Trump, an American fascist who wants nothing more than to destroy American democracy and put himself in power for life. Millions upon millions of ignorant, frightened Americans support him in that desire. The un-democratic American federalist system made Trump president once. Though most Americans would no doubt still vote against him, that system may again give such disproportionate political power to small population states that that despicable excuse for a politician and a human being will become president again. If he does, American democracy may be permanently destroyed.

Trumpist Republicans now control the US House of Representatives, where they can and will stop anything decent from happing though the Democrats control both the Senate and the White House. They also control most state legislatures, where they enact destructive law after destructive law. Today they even want to reintroduce child labor, an evil this country overcame nearly a century ago. They do everything they can do reduce the number of young people and people of color who are able to vote. Why? They say its to protect election security, which is pure bullshit. They do it because they know young people and people of color are far less likely to vote for them than are older, white people. Democracy be damned, they say. The only thing they care about is their own power.

We say we are the richest country in the world, and perhaps we are. Yet we have a homelessness crisis in which millions of our fellow Americans have no shelter over their heads, no reliable source of food, and no access to decent, reliable medical care. We all know of that tragic reality, but we lack the will to do much meaningful about it. We’re so selfish with our material resources and our time that we let the crisis continue on and on. Perhaps we could solve it if we would, but we won’t.

We are destroying the only planet we’ve got. Moronic billionaires like Elon Musk may dream of human settlements on Mars, but Earth is our only cosmic home. If any of us ever live on another planet, which seems unlikely, it will be only a small handful of us. We know that that is so, yet we keep pouring greenhouse gases into the only atmosphere we’ve got, thereby warming the planet with disastrous consequences. Sea levels are rising, threatening the very existence of island and coastal habitats the world round. We’re driving species after species of our fellow creatures out of existence with habitat change and destruction. We are already facing hordes of climate refugees, and that crisis will only get worse, probably far worse. But we’re are prepared to face it not at all and probably never will be. Tens of millions of Americans live in places that, in the foreseeable future, will have insufficient water to support their lives, and we have no idea what we’re going to do about it.

Tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans still parrot the patent absurdity that this is the greatest country on earth. Yet in addition to those horrors of our life that I just mentioned, institutional racism rages unabated; and most Americans either don’t know that it exists or, if they’ve even heard of it, they deny its reality. Millions upon millions of Americans vote for politicians who seek to legislate their hatred of gender and sexual minorities into law, denying the complex truth of human gender and sexual identity. Those same politicians work to assert male control over female bodies by banning abortion under the absurd contention that life begins at conception as though a collection of a few potentially human cells were a human being. American social fascism is on the rise. It is already harming the lives of millions of people. It will harm and even end the lives of millions more if we don’t stop it.

The only religious faith most Americans have ever heard of is a moronic and bigoted distortion of Christianity and blatant ignorance of the world’s other great faith traditions. Most Americans think of Christianity as an anti-intellectual, literalistic, hate-filled ideology that is actually the opposite of what Jesus Christ stood for. They think Islam is of the devil just because a few people who claim to be Muslim abuse that great faith and violate its central tenets for their own cultural and political ends. Far too many Americans buy the Nazi lie that there is something inherently evil about Jews and Judaism and are quite prepared to use violence against our Jewish sisters and brothers in a way that is, so far at least thank God, only a faint reflection of the Holocaust, something far too many of us deny ever happened. Will it remain only a faint reflection of that monstrous crime against humanity? Only time will tell.

What may once have been a more of less justifiable American patriotism has devolved into an American nationalism that puts what it sees as America’s interests far above the welfare of everyone else in the world and hates anything and anyone it perceives as un-American. Millions upon millions of Americans mix this American nationalism up with an abortion of Christianity that they claim is the one true faith. They insist that America is and always has been a Christian nation, never mind that it isn’t, never has been, and was never intended to be any such thing. Because they insist that we are a Christian nation, they are quite prepared to impose their version of Christianity on everyone else, never mind that doing so violates both one of this country’s founding political principles and the essence of the Christianity in the name of which they claim to act.

I’ll be honest here. Writing this parade of horribles has depressed the hell out of me. Everything I have said here is true, and it is all awful almost beyond belief. Yet as I insist that I am a Christian, I know that I’m supposed somehow to hold onto hope that evil does not have the last word and that God somehow can and will bring good even out of situations that seem hopeless to me. I must confess, however, that hope has never been anything I’ve been any good at. I once told my father that I found it very difficult to preach on hope. He said, “That’s because you don’t have any.” I’m afraid he was right, as he almost always was about me and about everything else. I did, however, just hear a sermon on hope that may be of some help even to me.

My pastor, Rev. Lisa Horst Clark of the First Congregational UCC of Bellevue, WA, recently preached a sermon on the resurrection story from Luke called “the walk to Emmaus.” That story is set on the Sunday of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Two disciples, probably husband and wife, are walking from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus, a town not too far from Jerusalem. A stranger joins them. The stranger is the risen Christ, but the disciples don’t recognize him. He asks what the couple had been talking about as they walked along. They say, are you the only one who doesn’t know what has happened in Jerusalem? There was a man who we had hoped would be the one to redeem Israel, but the Romans crucified him last Friday, and so we’ve lost all hope, or at least they say words to that effect. The stranger asks, wasn’t it necessary that the Messiah be crucified and rise again? The author of Luke has the stranger claim that all of the prophets insist that that is true, although no Hebrew prophet ever actually insisted any such thing. When the three people reach Emmaus, the couple imposes on the stranger to stay with them for the night. At supper, though he is not the host, he takes the bread, breaks it, and then the two disciples recognize him as the risen Christ, whereupon he disappears from their sight.

In her sermon on this text, Pastor Lisa said that the disciple’s statement “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” is perhaps the most hopeless line in all of scripture (or at least that’s what I remember her saying). These two disciples had placed all of their hope for liberation from Roman oppression on this man Jesus of Nazareth, who they confessed to be God’s Messiah. But the Romans, from whom he was supposed to liberate them, had executed him as a common criminal. So all of their hope was dashed. Crushed. There was no hope left for them or for any of their Jewish people. Yet it was precisely in that place of utter despair that Jesus had come to them. They didn’t recognize him at first, but eventually they did. They knew that he had been with them in their despair and that he did what he could to lead them out of it.

I guess the point that Lisa wants me to take from the story of the walk to Emmaus is that Jesus is with me in my despair over the state of the world. I don’t recognize him being in that despair with me, but then neither did the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognize him being in their despair with them, not at first at least. Is Jesus somehow present with me in my despair though I can’t see him? I guess if I really am a Christian I must trust that he is. That he is present though I can’t see him is, after all, the only source of hope I can find. I certainly have lost all faith in people. Yes, there are decent people in the world. Lots of them. Yes, some American politicians, Democrats mostly but as far as I can tell no Republicans, are trying to do at least some of the right things to address the causes of my despair and of the earth’s gross disorder; but no one is doing nearly enough. After all, to do nearly enough we’d have to make rich people pay their fair share of taxes, something the Republicans and even some Democrats will never allow. So no. There is no meaningful hope to be found in my fellow Americans. If there is any hope at all, it has to come only from God and Jesus Christ.

So I struggle mightily with my sense that I have Christian faith but cannot fight off the despair that clings to me every moment of my life. Lord Jesus, somehow I know you are here. You are always here. You never abandon me or anyone else. You never abandon the world you have created and called good. Help me to believe that the hell that so much of the world has become is not the end. That you will not abandon us to death and destruction. That somehow, with your help, we can bring life, peace, and freedom out of conditions that destroy all of them everywhere on earth these days. I don’t know how we’re supposed to do it. There are so few of us who see reality, know the truth, and want to act on it to improve the lives of all of your people. We can’t possibly do it on our own. Maybe, just maybe, with your help these is hope that we can. May it be so.