What's Missing?

 

What’s Missing?

March 26, 2021

 

It’s a familiar little story to many of us. You’ll find it at Mark 10:17-22. A man comes to Jesus and kneels before him. He ask Jesus what he must do to inherit what he calls eternal life. Unfortunately the story doesn’t tell us what he, or it, means by eternal life, but never mind. Clearly eternal life is something this man is powerfully concerned about and something he thought Jesus could help him with. Jesus says to the man you know the commandments. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t bear false witness, and a few others. The man claims to have obeyed those commandments all his life, so Jesus tells the man that he lacks one thing. He tells the man to sell all he has, give the money to the poor, then come follow him. The man goes away grieving because, we’re told, he had a lot of possessions.

What’s going on here? I mean, this man is successful both by the standards of the Jewish faith tradition of his time and by the standards of the world. He has done what his religion has told him to do, and what Jesus at first told him to do, in order to be right with God. He has kept at least the most basic commandments of the Jewish law. He’s at least relatively rich in the way the world measures such things. Few people in his world owned much of anything beyond the bare essentials, if they owned even that much. This fellow is an exception. He apparently has had the resources to acquire a whole lot more than the bare necessities of life. It would seem he has it made. I mean, religion is about obeying the rules, right? And being rich and owning a lot of stuff makes you happy, right? By both the religious and the secular standards of his time, and of ours, this guy is living the good life.

Yet he comes to Jesus and asks how he can get something he hasn’t got, something he calls eternal life. Why? I don’t think he’s being greedy or selfish here. Rather, I think that the question he asks Jesus tells us that at some level he knows he’s missing something really important. Why else would he go see Jesus at all? I don’t think it was just out of curiosity. He did after all ask Jesus a pretty important question. Jesus wasn’t any kind of success by the standards of either his faith tradition (which at the time was all about obeying rules) or of his secular culture. Like all secular cultures, including ours, Jesus’ secular culture was about acquiring wealth as the criterion for success. Jesus had no time for the temple authorities and their rules from Leviticus. He owned essentially nothing and relied on others to provide the necessities of life for him. On the surface it makes no sense for this worldly, successful man to go to Jesus for much of anything.

Yet something was missing in this man’s life. He sensed a lack, though he may have sensed it only at a subconscious level. He may not even have understood fully why he went to ask Jesus this question, but he went. Jesus knew the man was lacking something important, and he knew what it was. That’s why he told the man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. Giving to charities that help people in need is a very good and worthwhile thing, but that’s not why Jesus told this man to sell everything he owned and give the money to the poor. Jesus told him to do that extreme thing because he knew that it was the only way to move him beyond the place where he was stuck and get him moving toward finding what was missing in his life, in his soul.

So what was missing? Several things, or perhaps just one thing that we can express in several different ways. They’re the things that are so often missing from the lives of people with many possessions. A commitment to the values of the Reign of God rather than the reign of Caesar, whatever form Caesar may take at any given time and place. A commitment to follow God’s ways rather than the world’s ways. Commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves. A reason to live beyond himself and his selfish desires. A desire for more spiritual wealth rather than monetary wealth. A desire for a life of depth and real meaning. A commitment to what is good and true rather than to the false desires of the world. Jesus knew what this man was missing, and he prescribed shock therapy to bring the man’s unconscious sense of what he was missing into his consciousness so that he could deal with it constructively.

As the New Testament says, it isn’t money that is the root of all evil, it the love money that is. 1 Timothy 6:10. We can safely assume that the man in this little story loved money. In my experience the people with the most money are usually though not always people for whom money is the most important thing. This man’s love of money was keeping him from living into the better angels of his nature. It led him to substitute what is false for what is true. Jesus knew that about him. Perhaps at the end of the story the man was beginning to know it himself. We’re told that he went away grieving. Why was he grieving? He could have just brushed Jesus off telling himself that that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He didn’t have to take what Jesus said to heart, yet it seems that to some extent at least he did. He probably went away grieving because at some level he knew that Jesus was right. To use some old time religious language, he felt himself convicted. He wasn’t happy about it. He knew that to gain what was missing he’d have to turn his whole life around, to rethink his values and restructure his priorities. He’d have truly to admit to himself that he had been on the wrong track. None of that comes easily to any of us. Perhaps as he walked away from Jesus he hadn’t yet decided to do what Jesus told him to do. Perhaps he never would. Still, that he went away grieving tells us that somehow what Jesus had said to him to some extent at least struck home.

This story isn’t just about something that happened a long time ago in a place far away. It’s about us. This story points to the divine truth that true faith isn’t about obeying rules and true wealth doesn’t come from material possessions. And like all good Bible stories this one calls us to ask ourselves some hard questions. It moves me to ask, “Am I the man of this story?” Like him I yearn for a proper relationship with God, what the man in this story calls eternal life. Like him I have many possessions, or at least I do by the standards of much of the world if not by American ones. Like him I don’t cotton much to the idea of selling them all and giving the money to the poor. I think this story calls all of us to ask the same question the man asked Jesus and to be honest about answering it. I don’t mean that we necessarily need to sell everything we own and give the money to the poor. We too need the essentials of life after all; but I do think this story, like the whole Bible, calls us to reevaluate our priorities. To reassess our values. To be honest about whether the love of money or of anything else is keeping us from the fullness of the spiritual life that truly is a goal much to be desired, that is true wealth indeed. To be serious and prayerful in discerning what is missing from our lives. If we will do that, and if we are honest about our answers, this little story will have done its divine work in us. May it be so.

Help My Unbelief

 

Help My Unbelief

March 20, 2021

 

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.

 

There has been a sharp difference of opinion among people of faith over the admissibility of doubt in a life of faith. Two giants of twentieth century Protestant theology differed vociferously over the question. Paul Tillich insisted that doubt is inherent in faith and is a necessary part of it. Karl Barth once said would someone please tell Tillich that doubt is inconsistent with faith and is the negation of it. I come down on Tillich’s side of that divide, but then I come down on Tillich’s side of most every divide. Faith is not knowledge. Faith is not certainty. Faith is trust that certain things are real, things like the reality of God and the divinity of Christ. Trust means precisely that one lives as though we knew that these things are true when we actually don’t know that they are at all. Because we don’t know that they’re true, because we aren’t certain that they are true, there is always an element of doubt in our trust, in our faith. Doubt is unavoidable about anything about which we lack absolute certainty. That doubt doesn’t or at least doesn’t have to destroy out trust, destroy our faith. We just live with it, though most of the time we just ignore it.

There is one story in the Gospel of Mark that affirms out doubt. It’s the story of Jesus exorcizing a spirit out of a boy. You’ll find it at Mark 9:14-29. In that story a man from among a crowd of people tells Jesus that he has brought his son to Jesus because the son “has a spirit that makes him unable to speak, and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid….” Mark 9:17-18. The father had asked Jesus’ disciples to exorcize the spirit, but they had been unable to do it. Whereupon the spirit seizes the boy as the father had described. We’d probably say the boy had epilepsy or some other seizure disorder. The ancient world of this story said the boy had an evil spirit. The father says to Jesus, “if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Mark 9:22b. Jesus replies to the father, “If you are able!—all things can be done for the one who believes.” Mark 9:23. Then we read, “Immediately the father of the child cried out, ‘I believe, help my unbelief!’” Mark 9:24. Whereupon Jesus exorcizes the spirit out of the boy.

The NRSV says that the father spoke of his “unbelief.” We can I think take unbelief here to mean what we mean when we speak of doubt. The father believes in Jesus but apparently not to the point where he had no doubt. So it is, I think, with all of us people of faith if we’re honest with ourselves. We might work to convince ourselves that we never doubt the truth of our faith, but can any of us ever honestly say that we don’t? I don’t think so. I have been what I have called a professional Christian, referring to my status as an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for years now; and I can’t honestly say that. I know that faith is not certainty. There have been times in my life when God and Jesus Christ have been very real and present to me. I thank God for those times. They are wonderful even when they happen during very hard times in my life as indeed they have. But there have also been times in my life when God has seemed more absent than present, when God has not felt all that real to me. In other words, I am a man of both faith and doubt just like in the father in Mark’s story.

So what did Jesus do with this man who had just confessed both his belief and his unbelief? Did he say that since the man had both belief and unbelief there was nothing he could do for the man and his son? Not at all. Jesus says to the spirit possessing the boy, “You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!” Mark 9:25. Jesus had the power to make this boy well, and he didn’t let the father’s unbelief stop him from doing it.

We learn that God does not reject us because our belief is mixed with unbelief. God does not reject us because our faith is mixed with doubt. God doesn’t require or expect perfection from us, not in our actions, not in our faith. God knows that we are creatures, indeed God’s creatures, not gods. God surely knows the nature of human faith better than we do. God surely knows that faith without doubt is just not possible for most of us humans. God doesn’t reject us because we doubt. Rather, God enters our doubt with us and seeks to lead us out of it to the extent that we are able to move beyond it. So with the father in this story I say I believe, help my unbelief. I hope that perhaps you can say that too.

On Narrative and Divine Truth

 

On Narrative and Divine Truth

 

The story of Moses speaking with God at the burning bush at Mt. Horeb, another name for Mt. Sinai, is well known. You’ll find the part of it I want to speak about here at Exodus 3:1-15. It’s a really important story. It is the beginning of the foundational story of the great Jewish faith. As story however is has several very odd things about it, things that seem to me like narrative inadequacies. Do those inadequacies affect the deeper truth of the story? Let’s take a look at them to see what we can discover.

In this story Moses is tending the flock of his father-in-law. We run into the first narrative oddity in the story right away. The story says Moses led by flock “beyond the wilderness” to Mt. Horeb. Why would he do that? He’s coming from Midian, which is in the northwest corner of the Arabian peninsula. We don’t know exactly where Mt. Horeb/Sinai was, but it had to have been some distance from Midian across some of the most arid territory on earth. Why would Moses lead his flock across that desolate landscape where it is nearly impossible to find water? It sure seems like he wouldn’t, but the story says he did.

Then we encounter what seems to us like a significant inconsistency in the story. We read first that “an angel of the Lord” appeared to Moses out of a burning bush. Then it says that God spoke to Moses out of the bush. Which is it? An angel of the Lord or the Lord? Why does the story have this apparent inconsistency? Perhaps the explanation is that in ancient Hebrew literature the phrase “an angel of the Lord” actually means the Lord. Still, to us modern readers it sounds like we’ve got a significant inconsistency here.

Then the story says Moses did something odd. When he sees the bush that is burning but is not burned up he speaks. We read that he “said, I must turn aside and look….” at the burning bush. Why would Moses say anything here. Who’s he talking to? There’s no human present other than Moses. Was he talking to the sheep? Why doesn’t the text say he thought this thing rather than he said it? Perhaps we’re just dealing here with ancient storytelling conventions, but it does seem odd, to me at least, that Moses speaks.

Then God says something that also seems odd. God says that God has heard the cries of the Israelites in Egypt. Did that just happen? Wouldn’t God have known what was going on with God’s people in Egypt from the beginning? Why now? Exodus tells us that between the time of Joseph and the time of Moses the number of Israelites in Egypt had grown very substantially, to the point where there were, the story says, more Israelites in Egypt than Egyptians. Exodus 1:9. That didn’t happen overnight.[1] The Israelites didn’t become enslaved and oppressed overnight. Why is God acting now when God hadn’t acted before? The story doesn’t tell us.

Then God does something that seems perfectly inconsistent, at least at first glance. God tells Moses that God has come down to free the people from their enslavement and oppression in Egypt. That’s good, but then God tells Moses that he, Moses, is actually going to be the one to lead the people out of Egypt. Why would God first say God was going to do it, then tell Moses that Moses was the one who was going to do it? The closest the story comes to explaining that inconsistency is that it has God tell Moses that God will be with him as he does the job. Fair enough, and certainly true; but still Moses not God is the one who’s supposed to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let the people go. Again this aspect of the story seems odd.

Then God tells Moses something about a sign for him that the task on which he is to embark really comes from God. God tells Moses that the sign for him will be that when he has led the people out of Egypt they will worship God at Mt. Horeb/Sinai. Say what? The sign that this assignment comes from God isn’t going to be given until after the job is done? What sense does that make? Moreover, why would Moses need a sign at all? He’s standing there barefoot talking directly with God. Sure seems like that would be sign enough, but the story talks about this later sign as well. Perhaps it’s just literary foreshadowing, for we know that the people did worship God at that mountain after they got out of Egypt.

Then God gives Moses God’s divine name. God’s name is YHWH. The name itself is a divine mystery. It is untranslatable. The NRSV tells us that it is related to the Hebrew verb for “to be,” namely, “hayah.” The NRSV renders it as “I am who I am.” It then gives the alternative translations “I am what I am” and “I will be what I will be.” Then God shortens the name for Moses and for us. God says to Moses that he is to say to the Israelites “I am” has sent him. Most names in the Hebrew Bible mean something. “Israel,” for example, means one who struggles with God. This divine name either doesn’t mean anything or, better, it means something that transcends mere human meaning that human words cannot really express.

We have to ask however: Would that name have meant anything to the Israelites in Egypt? Although the text of the Hebrew Bible has used the name already by the time we get to Exodus, see for example Genesis 4:4,[2] this story in chapter 3 of Exodus is the first time in the biblical narrative that God’s divine name has been revealed. The Israelites in Egypt presumably had never heard it before, yet the Lord seems to suggest that the name will nonetheless assure them that their God really had sent Moses to them. Doesn’t make much sense, does it.

Then God tells Moses to say to the Israelites in Egypt that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has sent Moses to them. Well, OK, but would that have meant anything to the enslaved Israelites in Egypt? Would they even have heard of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Perhaps, but in this story a long time has passed since the days of those Hebrew patriarchs, and these stories are set in a time long before any of them were written down. The only way the Israelites in Egypt would have heard of those men would be if the stories about them had been passed on through oral storytelling. Perhaps they were, but if not then those names wouldn’t have meant a thing to the people to whom God was sending Moses. When we read this story carefully it becomes perfectly obvious that it has some significant narrative limitations.

Yet for all those limitations this story is of immense importance in both Judaism and Christianity. It is the beginning of what scholars call the salvation history of Israel. It sets in motion the events that eventually get the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. The Hebrew Bible uses the divine name YHWH throughout its many different texts. In the Gospel of John Jesus identifies himself using the divine name. See for example John 18:5-6. In the NRSV translation Jesus identifies himself to those come to arrest him by saying when they say they’re looking for Jesus “I am he.” Yet the Greek original here doesn’t say “I am he,” as a translator’s note tells us. It says I am, ego emi in the Greek. Jesus uses the divine name of God from his Jewish faith to identify himself as divine. In Christian worship and hymnody we sometimes call God “the great I am.”

I want to ask: How can a story with so many narrative limitations come to have such great significance for two of the world’s great monotheistic religions?[3] It can because we’re dealing here with two different kinds of truth, and the second of them does not depend on the first. When we critique the telling of a story as I have done here with the story of Moses at the burning bush we are dealing with narrative truth. We are dealing with story as story, with literary creation as literary creation. A story may be told well, or it may be told badly. It may be told in accordance with our modern criteria for good storytelling or in accordance with the criteria for good storytelling of the time in which the story originated, and those two are rarely the same.

There is however a different kind of truth. We can call it mythic truth, or metaphorical truth, or spiritual truth, or divine truth. By whatever name we call it this truth comes to us through story, but it does not depend on the quality of the story as story. The story is not itself the truth. Rather, a story that conveys this kind of truth, and the story of Moses at the burning bush definitely does, points beyond itself to a truth that is much deeper than mere story. It points us to a divine truth that we can discern or sense but that no words can ever really capture. This kind of story, of which the Bible is full, conveys divine truth, but it doesn’t do it by relating facts whether those facts are told elegantly or inelegantly. It does it by directing our attention beyond itself to the truth that lies beneath all truth and beyond all words, the truth of God.

Does the story of Moses at the burning bush convey spiritual truth in that way? Yes, of course it does. We wouldn’t still be paying attention to it if it didn’t. We start with he truth of the divine name. That name is very, very ancient, yet it is also perfectly contemporary. It points to the truth that God is somehow related to being. The great twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich called God the ground of being and even being itself. YHWH fits perfectly with that understanding of the nature of God. Ancient Israel called God essentially “to be.” When we make God less than being itself we turn God into an idol. The great Hebrew name of God, YHWY, points us toward that most profound spiritual truth.

This story points us toward another spiritual truth. It is the beginning of the story of God’s desire that the Hebrew people be liberated from slavery. Over the centuries it has told enslaved people in different times and places that God wants them liberated too. When enslaved people in the American south sang “God down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell ol’ Pharaoh, to let my people go” they weren’t just singing about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They were singing about their own longing for freedom and about God’s will that they too be freed from the injustice, oppression, and exploitation of the system of slavery, that they too be recognized as fully human men and women and treated with the respect due to all men and women. That God wants that kind of freedom and dignity for all people is a profound spiritual truth behind the story of the Exodus, and that truth is independent of the adequacy or inadequacy of the story as story. It is even independent of whether or not the story ever actually happened as an historical event. For all of its narrative inadequacies story of the Exodus points us toward that divine truth. And for that all we can say is: Thanks be to God!

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[1] Actually it almost certainly never happened at all. There are no Egyptian records that suggest any such thing. Here however I’m dealing with how the text tells the story, not with whether or not the story ever happened as an historical matter.

[2] When the word Lord is printed that way in small caps we know that the Hebrew original is YHWH. For an English translation that uses Yahweh rather than Lord for YHWH see the Roman Catholic translation The New Jerusalem Bible.

[3] All three of them actually, for Islam too considers Moses to have been a great prophet of God.

On Aging and Death

 

On Aging and Death

March 7, 2021

 

We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die. That’s how reality works. No one (except Jesus) gets out of this life alive. Moreover, every minute we live we age. We get older until we die. Some people die young. Some don’t survive infancy or even die in utero. Others of us are blessed with at least relatively long lives. Most of the people in my family tree in my generation or the generations before me died relatively young except for two aunts and my parents. My mother lived to be 87. My father died when he was 92. My twin brother is still alive but severely disabled both physically and mentally. I complain about physical conditions and short-term memory loss, but the doctors who attended my birth told my parents that I wouldn’t live through my first night. I’m 74 years old. I’d say I’ve beaten that prediction by a significant number of years. Still, I’m mortal. Some day I will day. You’re mortal too. Some day you will die.

Except in the case where someone dies suddenly before experiencing physical illness of any consequence aging brings on illness. Many of us today live far longer than nature ever intended for us to live, and we pay the price with illnesses we cure when we can and medical conditions that we manage. I’ve known for a long time that aging is not for sissies. People who live relatively long lives run up the bulk of their medical expenses in their later years, or at least most of us do. Living with physical illness is something we have to assume we will face if, that is, we don’t face it already. Even if we already have physical ailments and unhealthy conditions like high blood pressure, even if we know some of our biological family history and what people died of, we never know what the future holds for us with regard to our health. The unexpected terminal diagnosis is always a possibility. We can perhaps do things like watch our diet and exercise that may defer illness, but illness is a nearly unavoidable part of old age.

The task of those of us who are aging is to be at peace with the reality that health issues will come. To some extent they have been part of life for all of us, for some more than others. From common childhood illnesses, which are less common than they used to be, through colds and maybe the flu, and through diagnoses of medical issues like high cholesterol in our adult years, few people have avoided illness altogether before they reach advanced age. In old age medical issues become more of an issue. They will hit us harder if we delude ourselves into thinking that they won’t happen. Think of having lived into old age as a blessing (as hard as old age may be), for the only alternative is to die young. Most blessings come with a downside. Children are a blessing, but we worry about them for the rest of our lives—or theirs. Good health is a blessing, but it may mean exercising more that we want to, not eating too much of things we love like pizza and ice cream, and eating kale. The downside of aging is health problems, or at least that’s one of them.

Another is losing all of the people we’ve known and loved who die before us. Very few people came to my father’s memorial service not because he had no friends or professional colleagues but because he lived to be 92. Most of his friends and colleagues had died by the time he did. Today I’m eighteen years younger than Dad was when died, but I’ve already lost a wife, both parents, four aunts, three grandparents (the fourth died before I was born), two mothers-in-law, one father-in-law (the other died before I met my current wife so I never knew him), a mentor in ministry, and my PhD advisor to death. Our family members, friends, and colleagues are as mortal as we are. If we live long enough we’ll lose many of them before we shuffle off this mortal coil ourselves. Again our task is to be at peace with the unavoidable reality that unless we die young we will experience the deaths of many people near and dear to us.

Then there’s our own death. We must come to terms with it too, but just what is death? It is the cessation of all bodily functions. It is the end of our being, at least our being here on earth. The body and mind that were once alive become inanimate, mere physical objects—and decaying ones at that. Our physical selves relate to no one any longer. Survivors dispose of the dead body with more or less ritual and memorialization. They may grieve our passing. I’ve long felt sorry for people who have no one to grieve their deaths. Yet their lives continue for a while at least and with a hole in them that was the one who had died.

Many of us in our culture deal badly with the reality of our mortality. Urged on by advertising, we act as though if we buy the right wrinkle cream, dye out the gray, eat the right foods, don’t eat the wrong ones, and get our doctors to prescribe the right prescription drugs for us we’ll live forever. We won’t, and our spiritual and emotional health require us to get calm in the face of that reality Maybe my own struggle to get calm with it is why I’m writing this post.

I have dealt with death professionally for years. When I was a lawyer I defended many wrongful death cases. As a minister I did many memorial and graveside services. For the most part I dealt with those deaths without much difficulty. Professionalism requires and creates distance from the people and events you face. It has to. Emotional involvement of any depth in the matter you’re handling as a professional is bound to mess you’re handling of it. It’s not you don’t care about the person who has died or that person’s surviving loved ones. Especially in ministry you do. You know however that you must maintain distance if you’re going to do you job and do it well.

It is neither necessary, desirable, nor possible to maintain that kind of distance from your own death. Your death is not separate from you. It is intimately with you. It is the concluding act of your life’s drama. Like everyone else you do it alone. You can’t avoid it, so while you still can you need to come to terms with it. Or I suppose you could go through life ignoring it, except that I suspect that if you think you’re ignoring it you’re deluding yourself. At some level we’re all aware all the time that we are mortal, that death is our common lot.

So how do we reach peace with the prospect of our death? One way is to realize that since you can’t ultimately avoid death there’s no point worrying about it. Worrying about it just lets death degrade your life. This approach is similar to ignoring the reality of your death except that it fully recognizes that reality. It just sets awareness of death aside most of the time and focuses on life while life is there to focus on. Ultimately death will force itself into your consciousness, but until it does you pay no attention to it.

Another way of dealing with death is intentionally to work through whatever fear or anxiety you have about death so you can be at peace with your mortality. I suppose that’s what I’m doing here. It’s not so much that I fear death. I think I fear what the process of dying can be more than I do death. I prefer being to nonbeing, yet I know that some day I will cease to be, in this life anyway. I need to realize more fully that mortality is the natural order for all living things, including me. It is how we’re constituted as living beings. Our physical bodies cannot sustain life forever. So be at peace with who and what you are, and who and what you are includes your mortality. Don’t worry about not being what you are not. You can’t become what you’re not, at least not at the foundational existential level we’re talking about here. So be at peace with who and what you are. It may not be easy, but if you can do it your life will be more serene, more calm, more peaceful, more pleasant.

Then there’s the traditional religious way of dealing with death, that is, to see it as a passage from one plane of existence to another. In this approach you accept the proposition as true that there is life after death. The earliest Christians thought of life after death as a bodily resurrection at the end of time like the one Jesus had before the end of time. Tradition Christianity came to think of it more as the infinite survival of an eternal soul. Upon a person’s death that eternal soul departs the body but still exists. Once I walked into the hospital room of a parishioner as she took her last breath. A short time later the nurse who was present pointed up to a corner of the ceiling and said, “There she is, right there.” I didn’t have that experience of some immutable part of her being still present with us, but the nurse’s experience arose from that traditional religious belief that each person has an immortal soul. That belief is why we call death “passing.” For this kind of faith the essence of what it is to be us doesn’t die, it just passes from life on earth to life after life on earth. This belief has comforted generations of Christians and people of other faiths when a loved one has died or as they face their own deaths.

The problem with this view is that there is little evidence to support it. We are physical creatures. I once heard and atheist (who had been raised Catholic) say that life is something that happens to matter. He meant that that’s all life is. Whether it is that or not, in death our matter that had been animate becomes inanimate. The life that had happened to the dead person’s matter no longer happens to it. It’s easy enough to believe, as this atheist did, that that’s all that happens when a person dies.

There is little evidence that more than that happens upon death, but there is some; or at least there are some experiences that it is possible to take as such evidence. I’ll share a couple of my own experiences with that evidence (if that’s what it is) to show what that evidence is and what it isn’t. My first wife died of breast cancer in 2002. We had her body cremated and her ashes buried. A few months later I was walking a labyrinth, and I knew that she was walking it with me. It was like an experience with a sixth sense. I didn’t see her exactly but I sensed that she was there. She and I had a dog, an Irish Terrier named Jake. He became my dog only when my wife died. Years after her death I had to have Jake put down because his kidneys had failed. As I drove to the vet’s office to have it done I was an emotional wreck. As I drove, my first wife appeared to me and said, “It’s OK. I’m here waiting for him.” I say she appeared and spoke, but her appearance wasn’t like a normal sight. I had just some vague sense that she was in the car with me, in front of me, slightly above my eye level, and slightly to my left. I didn’t hear her in the ordinary way, but I heard her nonetheless. I can’t tell you how. I can’t tell you how it happened. I just know that I have no doubt that I experienced her being there and saying those few words to me.

Do these experiences and the countless others like them that other people have had prove that there is an immortal part of us that survives death and in some sense lives on, just on a different plane of existence? We might wish that they did. We might even convince ourselves that they do. Sadly, the truth is that they don’t. We cannot say where those experiences, real as they are, come from. Did they originate from some reality outside of ourselves? There’s no way to know. They could as easily, or perhaps more easily, have been generated by our unconscious minds as by something outside of us. We can believe that they came from one of those sources or the other, but there is no way to know.

Which brings me to where I am personally with my attitude toward death. I find the answer to the search for a way to deal with in the concept trust. I have the conviction, and I keep telling myself, that I can trust that whatever happens after death is right and good because it is how God has ordained it. Even if, as seems quite possible, there is nothing of or for us after death, that’s right and good because it is how God has set up reality for us. I don’t at all believe in hell or that God punishes us after death for our sins during our life, so I leave that notion out of consideration. If there is something like the heaven Christians and others have dreamt of, good. That is how God has ordained it. If not, that’s good too for the same reason. Death does not remove us from God’s order for existence even if that order means there’s nothing left of us after death. Whatever happens happens because it is how God has set it up. I trust that that is true.

I also choose to trust that death is not the end. I choose to trust that the experiences I described above of a deceased person nonetheless being with me do come from a reality outside of me and beyond my comprehension. I don’t know that those things are true. I trust that they are true. I live as though I knew they were true without actually knowing that they are. It facilitates my life to trust that my late first wife, Jake, and all the people I have known and loved continue their existence somewhere in God’s vast creation. Perhaps another way of saying it is that I hope that it is true, though hope is different from trust (and my father told me once that I struggle so much with the concept hope because I don’t have any). I am convinced that trust in God will get me through whatever I must go through while an intellectually unsustainable belief will not. So I live in trust, or at least I try to.

We’re all mortal. We are creatures not gods. Indeed the whole universe is mortal, but that’s a subject for another day. Our culture tells us through mass advertising and watered down popular religion not to think about mortality or to know that one day we’ll walk the golden streets of heaven. Our culture’s message is live as though you’ll live forever. And it’s all a big lie. We are mortal, and coming to terms with mortality requires thought and discernment deeper than our culture requires of us. My thought and discernment have led me to trust God. Perhaps yours will lead you there too.

The Republican Party is Illegitimate

 

The Republican Party is Illegitimate

March 6, 2021

 

We have only one legitimate political party in the United States today. It is the Democratic Party. The Republican party has become illegitimate. The Democrats have policy positions the purpose of which is to help the American people. The Republicans don’t. The Democrats are far from perfect. They aren’t nearly progressive enough, but they care about and seek to serve marginalized people. The Republicans don’t. The Democrats stand for a living wage for all people, the Republicans don’t. The Democrats want unemployed people to receive enough to keep body and soul together. The Republicans don’t. The Democrats take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously. Far too many Republicans don’t. The Democratic Biden administration is attacking the pandemic aggressively. They may actually get it under control. The Republican Trump let it rage unopposed for nearly a full year. The Democrats are willing to conduct foreign policy in coordination with our traditional allies. The Trump administration nearly destroyed those relationships and made other nations justifiably suspicious of American intentions. The immigration policy of the Democrats is not what it should be, but at least they don’t want to exclude people because of their race or religion. One of the first things the Republican Donald Trump did as president was try to stop all Muslims from entering the country. The Democrats will still spend far too much money on the military, but they may spend a little bit less than the Republicans would. Democratic President Biden is actually leading the nation. Republican President Trump never did. With the Democrats in charge at least some worthwhile things will get done. Under the Republicans nothing constructive has gotten done for decades.

The Republican Party has no policy proposals that would do anyone any good except the economic top 1% of the country. They are the party of white supremacy, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and just about everything else that’s wrong with this country. They ponder to only two groups, all those people in all those negative categories I just listed who are afraid and angry, and the immensely rich and their big corporations. They are not fiscal conservatives. When they’re able to do it they run up massive federal deficits, not because they’re spending money on anything worthwhile but because they keep cutting taxes for the very people who don’t need tax cuts. When the Democrats create deficits by spending money to help people the Republicans scream bloody murder about how horrible deficits are. To them deficits caused by their tax cuts for the rich are perfectly acceptable. The Republican Party is illegitimate because it has no plan for helping the American people and no desire to have one.

The Republican Party is radically obstructionist. Under President Obama their senators would vote against anything Obama proposed just because it came from Obama. They probably did that partly because he was Black but mostly just because he was a Democrat. They weren’t about to give him anything he could claim as a success, not that their obstructionism cost him reelection, which is what they were trying to do. That strategy came from Mitch McConnell, and he’s doing it again under President Biden. The Republicans in the Senate won’t vote for anything that comes from the Democrats.

The national Republican Party cares about only one thing—power. All they want to do with power is benefit rich people and destroy the environment in the process. Their power comes from the money rich people give them and the fact that ordinary people keep voting for them though they do nothing to benefit ordinary people. They pander to everything ordinary people get wrong in order to convince them to vote against their own self-interest. They’ve been doing that for a long time. One way that they do it is to pander to evangelical Christians’ opposition to legal abortion. Conservative clerics have whipped up a frenzy among their people about abortion with the spurious claim that human life begins at conception. Those people want to make abortion illegal for everyone in virtually every situation. Some Republicans politicians share that view. Others, like Donald Trump, have no personal convictions about the matter but play to the opposition to abortion in the Republican base in order to get votes people would not otherwise give them.

The Republican Party didn’t get this way overnight. The illegitimacy of the Republican Party has been developing for decades at least. I suppose we could trace it back at least as far as Herbert Hoover, who did nothing and wanted to do nothing to counter the Great Depression that was destroying the lives of millions of people. I’ll start however with Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964. He was a racist, or at least he was perfectly willing to let southern racists continue their inhumane system of Jim Crow segregation. Had he won he might well have gotten us into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He lost the 1964 election badly to Lyndon Johnson, although that may have had as much to do with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 as with anything else. In 1968 Richard Nixon, another Republican racist, devised what he called the “southern strategy.” That strategy, ultimately successful, was to get racist white southerners to switch from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans. Nixon knew there was only one way to do that. He had to appeal to southern racism without saying outright racist things. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but Nixon pulled it off.

White southern racists had voted for Democrats starting in 1876 because the Democrats ended the Republican-led Reconstruction and let those southerners create the Jim Crow system of racial segregation along with debasement and disempowerment of Black citizens. Starting at least by 1948, however, significant parts of the Democratic Party began to advocate for civil rights for Black Americans. In 1948 the Democratic National Convention adopted a relatively strong position in favor of civil rights for Black Americans. The entire Mississippi delegation and half of the Alabama delegation walked out in protest. In 1964 the Democrats enacted the Civil Rights Act of that year. A year later they passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those statutes were arrows to the heart of Jim Crow, and white southern racists knew it. They voted for Nixon in 1968 and made him president. They have mostly voted for Republicans ever since because the Democrats became the party of civil rights. The Republicans claimed to be the party of “states’ rights,” a dog whistle for letting states be as racist as they wanted to be. The Republican Party has never become a party firmly committed to civil rights.

The Republicans have used opposition to legal abortion as a pivotal issue in their effort to maintain power in the states and at the national level. In 1973 the US Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade, which held essentially that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion at least during an unspecified early part of her pregnancy. The Republican Party has been using the abortion issue to gain and exercise power ever since. They pander to Americans who may genuinely oppose abortion and the Roe v. Wade decision. They keep promising to overturn it, but they never have. Many Republicans have genuine moral principles against abortion, although they don’t always take into account all of the consequences of outlawing it. Others like Donald Trump have no personal convictions on the issue at all but use opposition to Roe v. Wade to hold onto the support of people whose other interests they disregard at will. The Republicans have promised for decades to reverse Roe v. Wade. So far they haven’t done it, although the current Supreme Court, which the Trump administration has had the opportunity to pack with rightwing extremists, may eventually do it.

Today the Republicans have a couple of other ploys they use to retain power though their policies are disadvantageous or even disastrous for most Americans. They take control of state governments, mostly by promising people lower taxes. Then they gerrymander the state’s congressional districts to give themselves disproportionate representation and therefore greater power. They’ve done that for decades. In more recent times the Republicans have tumbled to the fact that most Americans don’t like their policy positions or perhaps their lack of policy positions. So they have set out to change state voting laws to make it harder to vote. Republicans intend those laws to reduce the number of people voting, changing election laws to make it harder to vote. Republicans don’t win when there is large voter turnout. They can win only by keeping voters, especially Black and Brown voters, from voting. A lawyer for the Republican Party in Arizona recently admitted that truth  in oral argument before the US Supreme Court in a case challenging the party’s effort to reduce voter turnout in that state.

For all of these reasons the Republican Party has ceased to be a legitimate American political party. It hasn’t represented a majority of the American people for years. It neither does nor seeks to do anything to make the lives of ordinary Americans better. It gains power only by pandering to people’s  phobias and hatreds on the one hand and the economic interest of the wealthy on the other. For a political party to be legitimate it must honestly advocate policies that at least can be presented as being good for the country. The Republicans haven’t done that at least since before the election of the disastrous president Ronald Reagan in 1980. To be legitimate a political party must appeal to what Abraham Lincoln (the first Republican president) called the better angels of our nature. The Republicans haven’t done that for a long, long time.

Since the 2016 presidential election it has gotten worse. Far worse. In 2016 Republican voters made the TV showman and unethical businessman Donald Trump first the party’s presidential candidate, then made him president, albeit only because of the undemocratic way our constitution dictates that we do presidential elections. Trump, perhaps the worst president in American history or certainly one of them, tried to rule as an authoritarian who gave not a damn about the law, including the US Constitution. He tried to deconstruct the entire structure of the federal government. He made overt what the Republican Party had been doing covertly for a long time. He said there were fine people among racist, anti-Jewish white nationalists, among whom there is not and cannot be one single fine person. When it became likely that he would lose the 2020 presidential election he claimed that the election would be “rigged” against him and that massive voter fraud was the only way he could lose. When he lost that election he claimed over and over that he had really won it, by a landslide even, and that his victory had been stolen from him. He practiced Goebbels’ tactic of the big lie. His zealous, bigoted supporters began to chant “Stop the Steal!” Trump took up that phrase and urged those supporters to reverse the outcome of the election by force if necessary. On January 6, 2021, while he was still President of the United States, he incited a mob to attack the Capitol to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to certify the results of the electoral college vote. Chaos ensued. A Capitol police officer was killed. Crass hooligans broke into the office of Speaker Pelosi, posed sitting at her desk, and stole a laptop computer. Many people who were legitimately in the Capitol that day sent texts to their loved ones to say good-bye, believing that the mob would kill them. The mob failed to accomplish any of it goals. Congress certified the electoral college victory of Joe Biden. Yet violent insurrection against the government of the United States was the inevitable product of Trump’s pandering to racists and his propagation of the big lie that he had actually won the election.

The House of Representatives promptly impeached him for inciting the seditious riot of January 6. The House impeachment managers presented an overwhelming, air tight case against him to the Senate. The motion to convict passed 57-43, but the Constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority to convict a federal officer in an impeachment trial. Trump got away with it. He got away with it because the Republican Party had become the party of Trump. Only seven Republican senators voted to convict. Most of them have been censured by their state’s Republican Party. A great many Republicans want Trump to be the party’s nominee for president in 2024, and they want him to win.

The loyalty to Trump among his rank and file loyalists in the Republican Party is incomprehensible, but it is real. Nearly the only thing the Republican Party stands for today other than tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans is Donald Trump. A few noted Republicans can’t stand Trump, Senator Mitt Romney being the prime example. But Trump now rules the Republican Party despite his losing the 2020 election and becoming one of the few US presidents to lose reelection when they ran for it. Right after the Senate acquitted Trump Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he accused Trump of everything the House impeachment managers had said was true of him. A short time later McConnell said that he would support Trump were he the Republican nominee for president in 2024. How McConnell keeps from getting whiplash is beyond comprehension. Very few if any Republicans politicians can stand up to Trump and hope to survive their next primary election. The Grand Old Party as it styles itself should change its name to the Grand Trump Party, for he is nearly all they stand for.

The Republican Party has been illegitimate since it made Ronald Reagan its presidential candidate in 1980. He duped Americans into believing that the US really is the greatest country on earth, which it isn’t, and that it best expresses its greatness through military might and uncontrolled market economics to benefit the top levels of Americans economically. He started the Republican Party on the road to Donald Trump with nearly catastrophic consequences for the country and the world. A political party the sole purpose of which is to put a would-be dictator back in power simply is not legitimate, yet that is what the Republican Party has become. We can only hope and pray that either the Republican Party regains its senses or that a new party arises to take its place. It is highly doubtful that either our country or the world could survive another four years with Trump as president.

On Trumpists and Trumpism

 

On Trumpists and Trumpism

March 2, 2021

 

We face a mystery in our national life these days. It’s named Donald Trump. It includes the way millions of Americans cling to him as their savior or their only hope for the future, none of which makes any sense at all. Donald Trump was easily the worst or at least one of the worst presidents this country has ever had both as a person and as a politician. He is entirely self-absorbed and selfish, giving not one good God damn about anyone else, including those who so idolize him. His sexual morals are deplorable. He is uninformed about nearly every issue. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t listen to others. He thinks he knows complex technical subjects better than the acknowledged experts on those subjects. He craves adoration but does nothing legitimately to earn it. He believes that only he can solve the world’s problems though he has never solved a problem in his life but has created an untold number of them. His actions as president are every bit as bad. He used the presidency to enrich himself and his family. He did everything he could to destroy the environment and make the wealthy wealthier. He ruined our relationships with our traditional allies, pulled us out of the Iran deal and nearly went to war with that country, ripped families apart at the southern border, built part of a useless border wall that keeps no people out but blocks migration routes for wildlife. He cozied up to dictators as long as they weren’t Iranian, debased the Justice Department, obstructed justice, and put himself above the law. He introduced as much discrimination against LGBTQ+ people into the federal government and the military as he could. Hundreds of times he repeated the big lie that the 2020 election was rigged and his victory was stolen from him. As a final act of desperation he incited a mob to invade the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow our constitutional form of government. The list of Trump’s transgressions could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. Donald Trump is as despicable as American politicians come these days both personally and professionally.

Yet over 70 million Americans voted to reelect him. He has so taken over the Republican Party that it ought to change its name to the Trumpist Party. White supremacist groups, always part of his base of support, vow that they have only begun to fight to put him back in power, and they don’t mean help him win the 2024 election. He keeps repeating the big lie that he really won the 2020 election, and that lie keeps his supporters committed to him and ready to use violence in support of him. A great many Republicans want him to run again in 2024, and they want him to win that election. That he has ever had any support is distressing. That he still has it is nearly beyond comprehension. Yet we can never solve a problem without first knowing its causes, so we must at least try to comprehend the reasons for the phenomenon that is Donald Trump.

We start to do that by first looking at this country to understand the context within which Trumpism flourishes. The demographics of this country are changing in profound ways. At least until very recently this country has been run by and for the benefit of white men. Whites have been a substantial majority of the population. White privilege was the order of the day even more than it is today. All the people who ran things in business, academia, the military, and politics were white. It’s not that all white people were wealthy or even financially secure. Many weren’t, but even the poorest, least educated, least sophisticated white man could and did look around him and say at least I’m not female or Black. There was always someone lower in society’s structure to whom every white man could feel superior because they were white. Of course their being white didn’t actually make them superior to anyone, but their culture told them that it did.

All of that is changing. Racism and sexism are still massive problems for our country, but we have made enough progress in overcoming them that the world looks very different than it did fifty or sixty years ago. Women run universities and giant corporations. The vice president is a woman. She’s even a woman of color. The president before Trump was Black. Perhaps most significantly the numbers of Black and Brown Americans are increasing so fast that within a relatively few years whites will be a plurality but no longer a majority of the population. Being white still confers privilege in this country, but doesn’t confer as much privilege as it used to. In future years it will, and should, confer even less.

Many Americans experience the changing demographics and ethic of this country as threat. They perceive, perhaps only subconsciously, that they are losing their privileged status in American society. They think that people of color are taking their jobs, their schools, their influence. They are afraid. They know at some level that America’s future will look very different from American’s past, and it feels to them that all the change that is taking place disfavors them for the benefit of people they’ve always seen as below them. Their fear makes them angry. Their anger turns some of them violent.

Many of them turn to the politics of complaint and victimhood. White people are still privileged in this country. They hear complaints and expressions of victimhood from other demographic groups. Those groups have legitimate complaints and are victims of this country’s numerous isms and phobias—racism most of all but also sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Sometimes those complaints get a lot of attention. They can dominate the television news the way they did after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, in May, 2020. It seems to many white people that the country responds to complaints of victimhood but not to them. So they complain. They present themselves as victims. Doing that has various advantages for them beyond perhaps getting some public attention. Common complaints and claims of victimhood create bonds between people. They can create community. They can even create identity. It’s not surprising that a fearful and angry demographic would resort to them.

These white men we’re talking about are likely to blame the government for many of what they perceive to be the causes of their problems. At least they blame the government for not solving those problems, as if the government could ever reverse demographic trends. Along comes Donald Trump. He’s running for president, but he attacks the government he’s running to lead in ways that they would themselves if they were capable of it. He says he’ll “make America great again,” by which he means he’ll turn the clock back to a time when white men ran everything and weren’t being displaced by other people the way the whites attracted to Trump believe they’re being displaced. He gives them dog whistles that reinforce their endemic racism. He says there are fine people among violent white supremacists and neo-Nazis. He panders to their prejudices and makes them believe that he and only he can and will solve their problems. He tells them exactly what they want to hear, so they do more than vote for him. They cling to him. They idolize him. Some of them very nearly worship him. It doesn’t matter that he could never really do most of the things he tells them he will do. They believe his lies because those lies mesh with their own fears and prejudices. They will even the believe the big lie that he won an election he lost though there is no evidence to support that claim whatsoever. Facts don’t matter to them, only having their fear assuaged and anger affirmed does.

The fanatic support by millions of people of the charlatan and would-be dictator Donald Trump is the greatest problem our country faces. It represents rot from the inside not threat from the outside. That is does makes it all the more difficult to counter. Giving Trumpists facts is useless. They’ll just spout “alternative facts,” meaning lies, and call the truth fake news. Perhaps the only thing that will defeat the Trumpist movement is time. The clock will more forward as it always does, not back. The demographic trends that are a primary cause of the Trump movement will continue. Our country will continue to change just as it always has. Trump is 74 years old. He will pass from the scene. His movement will too. Our task is to see to it that it doesn’t cause more harm before it does. Nazism would have faded and failed in Germany had responsible Germans not bought into its lies but had prevented Hitler from ever taking power. Trumpism will fade and fail too unless we make the mistake of letting Trump back into office. May we be vigilant and diligent in seeing that he never comes into power again.

Everything Upside Down

 

Everything Upside Down

March 1, 2021

 

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.

 

 

Jesus turned everything upside down. He blessed the meek not the strong whom the world so admires. He blessed the peacemakers not the warmakers the world so honors. In a thoroughly patriarchal society where women were mostly relegated to household duties (not that there’s anything wrong with household duties, there’s just something wrong with limiting anyone to those roles) he said the sister who assumed the role of the man and sat at his feet to learn had chosen the better part over the sister who stayed in the traditional woman’s role. In his parables the prodigal is welcomed home no questions asked, the hated Samaritan is the hero of the story, and workers are paid according to what they need not according to what they have earned. To a world that so loved to hate them he said love your enemies. It’s easy to wish that Jesus had been more specific about what the realm of God actually is, but it’s not really hard to figure it out. Take everything the world believes and values, the way the world organizes itself, everything the world thinks is important or honorable and turn them upside down. That’s the realm of God.

There’s one story about Jesus actually physically turning some things upside down. It appears in all four Gospels, although John places it at a different time in Jesus’ ministry than the other three do. It’s usually called the cleansing of the temple, although that’s not actually what Jesus was doing. Mark’s version is the oldest. In it we read that when Jesus got to Jerusalem at the beginning of what would turn out to be his last few days before his death he went to the temple. The Jerusalem temple was the holiest place in Judaism. It was the seat of Judaism’s religious leaders. In Mark we read:

 

And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. Mark 11:15-16.

 

Mark tries to make it sound like Jesus is indeed cleansing or purifying the temple, but really to understand what he’s doing we need to overlook what Mark says and get to know a bit more about how the temple operated and was meant to operate. First, why were people selling doves and presumably other animals in the temple? Because animal sacrifice was the primary function of the temple. In first century Judaism people sacrificed animals for many different reasons, and some have described the Jerusalem temple as basically a slaughter house. Not any old animal would do. The animal had to be pure, without defect. The only way a worshipper come to offer animal sacrifice could be sure the animal he offered was adequate was to buy one at the temple. That’s why people were selling animals in the temple. Why were there moneychangers in the temple? Because people gave money to the temple. Indeed they were all supposed to pay a temple tax and were considered to be sinners if they didn’t. The temple however could not accept the only coins the people would have had. Those were Roman coins. They were defiled because they had images of the emperor on them and called him the son of the divine one. For Jews those coins were blasphemous. They used them out in the world because they had to, but the couldn’t use them at the temple. Still, they had to pay their temple tax and may have given the temple additional money as well. So the temple had its own money. It had coins that weren’t defiled and blasphemous the way the Roman coins were. The moneychangers at the temple changed the people’s unusable Roman money for usable temple money. Neither the sellers of animals nor the moneychangers defiled the temple. They were a necessary part of the temple’s operation. The temple didn’t need to be cleansed of them, it couldn’t operate without them.

Then here comes this rube from the backcountry overturning tables and chairs and driving the animals out of the temple. He must have seemed quite mad. If he wasn’t cleansing the temple, and he wasn’t, what was he doing? He was staging a prophetic act the point of which was to say the temple isn’t what you need. God doesn’t need it. God doesn’t want it. He isn’t cleansing the temple, he is symbolically overthrowing it. He’s doing nothing less than turning the religious establishment of his day upside down. We can also understand him to be saying to us be careful that your religious establishments don’t get it wrong the way the Jerusalem temple did. They may not be what you need or what God wants. They may need overturning as much as the Jerusalem temple did. This story also asks us what else in our lives and in our world needs overturning. If you’ll start to think about it you’ll see that there’s an awful lot that does.

Yet symbolically overthrowing the temple was far from the most radical and powerful thing Jesus did to overturn the world. The most radical and powerful thing he did to overturn the world was get himself crucified. I don’t mean that he intentionally sought crucifixion. I mean that he pursued God’s mission for him to the end even though the end was torture and a miserable, unjust death on a cross. The thing that distinguishes Christianity from every other faith tradition on earth is that we follow a crucified savior. If we can’t make meaning out of Jesus’ crucifixion we can’t make meaning out of our faith. It is what Jesus’ crucifixion means that turns the world upside down.

To get at that meaning we’ll look at one of Paul’s most profound theological statements about the cross. In 1 Corinthians we read:

 

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God….For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. 1 Corinthians 1:18, 21-25.[1]

 

To understand what Paul is saying here we must start by looking at the cross of Christ from the world’s perspective. To the world Jesus was nothing but a fool and a loser. He didn’t have to get crucified. He could have avoided it. All he had to do was recant everything he’d said and promise neither to do any more miracles nor be in any way a problem for Rome. He didn’t do those things. So the Romans picked him up like a common criminal, or at least a common political criminal, and nailed him to a cross to die a miserable death like they had done so many times before him and would do so many times after him. He preached a lot of inflammatory nonsense. He’d stirred up a big following by healing people, and the Romans didn’t tolerate people with mass followings. No, to the world he was no hero. He was a fool and a loser.

That’s why Paul says that the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, that is, those who live according to the ways of the world. That’s why Paul says Christ crucified is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. I can hear people saying to Paul, “You mean to tell me that this yokel from Galilee who got himself executed as a criminal is my Lord and Savior? Hah! What utter nonsense! You mean to tell me he’s the long-expected Messiah? You’ve got to be kidding! The Messiah will be a king who will drive the Romans into the sea, not some poor working stiff who gets himself crucified! And what do you mean he’s the Son of God? He’s absolutely nothing like a god. He’s not powerful. He’s not cunning. No one ever said he was another Adonis. Get out of here with your ridiculous claims about this loser!”

Yet Paul calls him the power of God and the wisdom of God. He says that God’s weakness is stronger than human strength, and God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. He was of course right about that. What’s weaker than a man on a cross? Yet three hundred years after Paul the cross of Jesus conquered the empire that had executed him. Today that cross is displayed all over the world as a symbol of God’s love and grace. The world said we need strength, power, might. God’s wisdom said no you don’t, you need a demonstration of how I enter into everything in human life with you, even the really bad stuff. No one worships Caesar Augustus today. Two billion people worship Jesus Christ. More importantly, since his day billions of people have found their connection with God in and through the Crucified One. We have found God’s grace through him. In him we have experienced peace, forgiveness, courage, and inspiration. The foolishness and weakness of the cross of Christ have given an untold number of people new life, resurrection in a sense from life’s burdens, trials, and failures. There is divine power in the cross of Christ that those who live only by the ways of the world cannot comprehend. To them the cross is a foolish stumbling block. To us it is life and hope, courage and grace.

So the cross of Christ really does turn everything upside down. The hapless loser becomes God Incarnate. Torture and execution become the key to life, both life here on earth and, we trust, life forevermore. No human set out to make a crucified man from a backwater part of a backwater part of the Roman Empire the earth’s Savior. No human ever would. We didn’t do it, God did it. God turned the standards and expectations of the world upside down. In God’s upside down world we find life, we find salvation.

We also find a powerful and frightening call. In Christ God turned the world of Christ’s day upside down. God calls us to do the same in our world. Christianity is not a conservative religion, though it has tragically come to be seen as that by most people. It is a revolutionary religion, nonviolent but still revolutionary. God calls us to turn the social structures of the world upside down, to make the last first and the first last. God calls us to upend the world’s addiction to violence and oppression. God calls us to create a world in which everyone has enough because no one has too much. God calls us to overturn the world’s addiction to material goods and replace it with life lived by spiritual values. God calls us to do nothing short of turning the whole world upside down. God promises to be with us as we do, so let’s get on with it, shall we?

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[1] I consider the two passages in this post together because they appear in the Revised Common Lectionary for Sunday, March 7, 2021.