At the Hanging Tree

The photo is of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916. He was repeatedly lowered and raised onto a fire for about two hours. A professional photographer took pictures of the lynching as it unfolded.

There have been lynchings within living memory, in the '80s. If this were wholly past history, there wouldn't be over 70 active KKK organizations in the United States today.

This month (March 2018) in our small southern town a dozen people, blacks and whites, gathered under a hanging tree. The noose dangled in the breeze. A black high school student read powerful blank verse about her daily experience with racism. An elderly black leader in the community climbed painfully onto a chair, and spoke briefly with the noose around his neck. "Lest we forget," he said, "what is burned into our history, our understanding of how our society still treats us, our 'place'." His goal was to make a safe space where the trauma of the black experience and its political and social implications could be named and discussed across color lines openly. 

I was nervous, because he'd asked me, an elderly white man, to give a prayer following his remarks. Here's what I came up with:

Oh Lord, you've shown us the way, but it is so hard. 

Lord, you've shown what those of us with privilege should do. We ask for your courage.

For Lord, you're the most privileged of all. You have eternal life. You have power. Yet you laid it all down. We were disappointed in life, and angry at its injustice, and you didn't force us to behave. You give us our freedom, our choice. You didn't call on your legions of angels to protect you, you refused to coerce us, you gave yourself into our power. And we hung you on a tree. 

Lord, you accept us even when we do you wrong. You sat down and ate with us, while we were yet sinners, offenders. You ate from the same bowl as us, traitors. And we crucified you for it. If we are to display your spirit, Lord, that's the risk we have to take with each other. We have reasons to fear each other. We have reasons to want to control each other. But your spirit, Lord, would have us give up all forms of control, physical control, social control, economic control, give up manipulation and coercion, give ourselves into the control of our enemy, like you did with Pilate—that's giving them freedom—and risk everything on their choice, on whether they respond with your spirit too? Oh God. 

This is a hard way for us, Lord. We ask for your courage. We get the message, we will try to treat each other the way you treated us. That is our goal, Lord, we often fall short. Forgive us, Lord, and help us be like you. 

Lord, there's another piece of this bloody story too. Some of us are hurting, Lord. We've been traumatized. We are in pain. This tree is what the system does to us. We've seen this kind of thing before, and we'll see it again. Are we supposed to climb up on that tree, is that all you've got to offer, Lord? We could use a little power, here. 

But you remind us that you wanted to heal your enemies, and part of that was confronting them and calling them to repentance. You wanted to ignite their spirits, not snuff them out. If we can really hope for that, Lord, it would be OK. We don't have to be on top. All we want is a just relationship. We want to muddle through life together, not on top, not on the damn bottom, as equals. We want to be able to confront them with what they've done and continue to do, and call them to repentance, while at the same time showing them that we will not coerce them. 

Help us to heal our enemies, Lord, while they are still oppressing us. We ask that we succeed in igniting your spirit in our enemies so that they change their ways and stop crucifying us. We ask that the cross, that tree, not be our lot. We ask that we succeed where you didn't, Lord, and so many of our brothers and sisters didn't. Our only hope is that your weakness is stronger than the power of men. 

Be with us, Lord. We are your hands and feet, be with us in our suffering. Give us the strength to fight power by igniting your spirit in our enemies. This is hard, Lord. We ask for your courage. We ask for your spirit to dwell in us. 

Amen.

Several people expressed thanks for the prayer.

A Scandalous Origin of the Divinity of Jesus

It may be that a scandalous pun played a role in the development of Christianity.

Jesus, like all Palestinian Jews of his time, spoke Aramaic. Only the highly educated knew Hebrew, and all of them spoke Aramaic in everyday conversation. Jesus' teachings to his disciples, his conversations at home, and his debates with priests and pharisees, were in Aramaic.

Yet the New Testament is written in Greek. And therein could lie a scandalous pun that played a role in how, and why, Jesus became known as the Son of God.

Jesus was known as the son of Mary.

Mary in Hebrew is Miriam. In Aramaic, Maryam. In Greek, Maryam can become either Mariam or the shortened Maria (the Gospels use both, sometimes to describe the same person, Maria/m Magdalene). To the Roman and Greek speaking world, Jesus' mother was Maria. Just like modern Spanish.

Now to the pun. The Aramaic word for "Lord" (used extensively in the Aramaic version of the Jewish Bible where Jews wished to respectfully avoid using YHWH, the name of God) is "Marya". Jesus son of Maria. Jesus son of Marya. Oops.

With Christianity emerging from the reverberation between Greco-Roman and Aramaic cultures, the possible confusion between Maria and Marya might have had a real impact on how people understood things. Imagine Jerusalem street urchins chanting "Jesus son of Maria" in Greek, and tweaking the accent just a bit to goad their local priest into apoplexy at their heresy.

Hence perhaps also some of the reverence given to Maria/Marya. It could make for an interesting feminist interpretation.

Or maybe it's just insider language. Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, but if they knew any Aramaic words at all, surely "Marya" was one of them. So a street preacher could proclaim about Jesus son of Marya to a flock of diaspora Jews, and they'd get it, and the watchful Roman legionary would hear "Maria" and be none the wiser, or could at least choose to ignore it. For only Caesar could be acknowledged as ultimate Lord.

All this is fascinating, but to my mind not of much importance. What makes scriptures significant is the reverence in which the living hold them. What makes written narratives significant is the power they have to reveal, to enlighten, their readers. I don't care about how a narrative evolved, I care about what truth about life is expressed in the story.

The truth about life encapsulated neatly in the divinity of Jesus is that God, in all God's creative power, is to be recognized in the pinnacle, the essence of humanity, a servant, who would rather die than coerce, and who has the gall to call us to repent for behaving otherwise.

reference material: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Palestinian_Aramaic

http://kurios.homestead.com/marya_the_lord_in_aramaic.html

http://eliyah.com/forum2/Forum1/HTML/002811.html

photo credit: Lawrence OP Pieta via photopin (license)

Easter 2017

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

Some Christians find those words at Easter a bit more than they can muster. That Jesus came back to life in his physical body isn't a sure thing, or a big thing, for them.

I think there were three things that caused the New Testament church to find the resurrection so fundamental; three meanings packed into, carried by, the resurrection story. For many of us, two of the three have fallen by the wayside. But the third!

The first, was that reality had broken through to resurrect Jesus bodily, which was proof that Jesus was tied to reality in a wholly unique way, and validated him as Messiah.

Given two millennia of distance in time, it is hard for a person of scientific bent to accept that relatively undocumented event as any kind of hard proof. Why wasn't Jesus revealed to the public (Acts 10:41), but only to those who knew him well before his death?  Why do the gospels go to such lengths to show that after the resurrection Jesus' face was not recognized, often, by those who knew him best?  

Mary Magdalene "...but she did not realize that it was Jesus." 

Two disciples on the road to Emmaus: "but they were kept from recognizing him." Hours of close conversation later "Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread."

The disciples, on a mountain in Galilee "When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted."

The disciples, fishing in the sea of Galilee, talking with someone on the shore "but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus." and some time later, when they're standing right next to him "None of the disciples dared ask him, 'Who are you?' They knew it was the Lord." If they knew so well, why did they even think of the question? Why was it noted in the scripture?

It's as if you had to know Jesus really well to recognize, despite some physical differences, a psychological unity of character, or something. Call it spirit. Conclusion: some people were walking around that by their spirit were recognizably Jesus?

The second was the matter of their own resurrection. Jesus was to be the first of many. Their own hope of a life after death, of death's being conquered, was based on Jesus' resurrection. 

Many people nowadays doubt the afterlife, or an end-of-history resurrection. Many people don't want to live forever. For myself, without death I feel I have no dignity. Talk to me for over a thousand years and you'd be bored stiff with me. Given that I am so limited, what makes me tolerable, even enjoyable, is that like a good tune I have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But the third! The third was their understanding of themselves, of the church. In biblical times Jews understood a human to be a body of earth inhabited by a spirit-breath-character (see The Healer Messiah Chapter 1). If the body wasn't breathing, it was dead, it had no spirit. The church was seen as the very body of the Messiah inhabited by the spirit of the Messiah, which was the very character of God (see The Healer Messiah Chapter 4). 

Thus the church+, the church plus the Holy Spirit, was the bodily resurrected Messiah, walking the earth at the right hand of God, establishing justice and peace. For God's spirit appreciates even God's enemies, and wants to have a covenanted and confrontational relationship with them. The explosive growth of the church was powered by this groundbreaking understanding of personal, social, and political relationships.

That one still catches my breath, at Easter. That one still makes me shout my Hosannahs, Alleluias and Amens. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

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Peanut Butter, Mostly.

[At our Mennonite church recently I was the "storyteller" for the children's Sunday school classes, with what for me was a difficult scripture assignment... ]

Hi guys. Today I'm going to try to explain why many people in our church think children shouldn't take communion. You know, when we eat a tiny bit of bread, and drink a tiny sip of grape juice, together. Why don't we let you children do that?

One kid pipes up "Because we haven't been baptized yet?" [There is much to be said for both child baptism, and adult baptism. Good things can be done with either one. But today I'm going to try to do something good with the Anabaptist, adult baptism approach.]

Yeah, but why don't we baptize you when you're little?

Well, what are some other things we don't let children do? Would you like to get into one of the cars in the parking lot, start the engine, and drive out onto the highway?

"YES!!" said one. "NO WAY!", said another.

Right, it would be fun, but you could end up hurting yourself, or hurting someone else. If you made a mistake, it could be terrible. It's dangerous. That's why we wait until you're grown.

FIRST THING: Once I was a young man who didn't have much time in the morning before going to work. So for breakfast I'd make myself toast with peanut butter on it—that was the quickest breakfast I could think of. And since I already had the peanut butter and bread out, I'd make a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, put them in my lunch bag, and drive to work.

As soon as I got to work, I'd eat my lunch.

Then I'd work all day. When I got home in the evening, I was really hungry, so I'd make myself a snack before supper, the quickest thing I could think of...

"A peanut butter sandwich!" yelled someone.

Right. I remember one day somebody asked me "What kind of a man are you? What are you made of?" And I remember thinking, "Peanut butter, mostly."

And bread, don't forget the bread. So, what are you made of?

[Would you believe pizza, olives, ice cream, sushi... ]

SECOND THING: Does anybody know what "Christ" means?

No, it's not Jesus' last name. "Christ" is a Greek word that means the same thing as the Hebrew word "Messiah." So does anyone know what "Messiah" means?

[One kid says "Healer", I say "close". One kid says "Savior", and I say that's close too, can you be more specific?]

OK, does anyone know what a "doctor" is? What does a doctor do?

Right. A doctor's job is to stop sickness. "Messiah" or "Christ" isn't a family name, it's a job, sort of like doctor, or parent, teacher, or computer programmer. It means, what's your work. When we say Jesus Messiah, or Jesus Christ we mean something like Jesus, doctor. Christ is the name of a kind of work. But of course doctor isn't quite the same job as Messiah. The job of a doctor is to stop sickness, but the job of a Messiah is: to stop war. A Messiah keeps things fair, so people don't fight. Isn't that a great job?

Have you ever heard your momma or daddy tell someone what their work is? Like they might say "I'm a doctor", or "I'm a teacher", or "I'm a parent." When we ask someone what their work is, they answer as if we've asked them "What are you?" They don't say "my work is teaching" they say "I'm a teacher."

So, what would you like to be? What kind of work would you like to do?

[General discussion ensues. Anybody for zombie master?]

THIRD THING: So now we have two questions, "What are you" (which usually means "What is your work?" like "nurse") and "What are you made of?" (like "peanut butter"). Sometimes we mix the two questions together, to make one a story about the other. For instance, today's Bible story answers the question "What is a Christian?" meaning "What is a Christian's job?" by answering the question "What are Christians made of?" So, what do you think Christians are made of?

Here is the story, of the last time Jesus ate with his friends before Jesus was killed.

 Matt 26:26-28: During the meal Jesus took some bread in his hands. He blessed the bread and broke it. Then he gave it to his disciples and said, “Take this and eat it. This is my body.”
²⁷ Jesus picked up a cup of wine and gave thanks to God. He then gave it to his disciples and said, “Take this and drink it. ²⁸ This is my blood, and with it God makes his agreement with you. It will be poured out, so that many people will have their sins forgiven.”

Messiah, mostly. That's what Christians are made of, and that's what our job is. Messiah, mostly. Our job is to stop war. Our job is to keep things fair, so that people don't fight. It's not easy, and it can be dangerous. That's why we wait until you're grown.

photo credit: Dietmar Temps Buddhist novices, Myanmar (Burma) via photopin (license)

Credo

 

I don’t believe in God.

Or I do. It depends on what God is. If you take the normal, American street definition of God, then no, I don’t believe in that God.

To explain I’ll have to use the whole Trinity, in the order: God the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son, each time contrasting the street version with mine.

And this is just a blog post, not a tome. It isn’t a convincing argument, it’s just an executive summary pointing in a certain direction.

God the Father

Street version: God is a supernatural person who knows all the past and the future, who can violate the laws of physics at will, and who is in total control of everything.

My version: Within evolution, of species or of cultures or of behaviors, I see four rules (though actually the latter two are emergent consequences of the first two).

Mutation: Change happens.

Selection: Life is hard, it is easy to cease existing. In our species’ case, we need water, food, shelter, and we don't reproduce without them.

Collaboration: If a given form (species, cultural element) A benefits some other form B which in turn benefits form C… which in turn benefits form A, then that positive feedback gives every form in the loop a selective advantage. A stable ecosystem is a vast network of collaboration.

Coercion: a form can, via force or weaponry, rob other forms of their resources, to the point of enslaving or killing them. A stable ecosystem can be parasitized, which destabilizes it.

These four are the implacable rules of existence. They are our father and our mother. We can get with the program, or perish.

Which is stronger, collaboration or coercion? Creation or destruction, giving or taking, grace or power, the beloved community or empire, stable order or unstable chaos, life or death (think “therefore choose life”)? In the short term, power. In the long term, grace. We’re betting long.

Whoa, you say, where is that warm loving personal God people talk about? Hang on, I said I’d need the whole Trinity. But yes it’s true, where the street sees a supernatural creator God of the physical world, I see implacable logical rules which utterly shape the biological and social world we live in.

Rules aren’t physical, not like a stone is physical. So maybe that’s the overlap between the street’s “supernatural” and the way I think of things. The street’s supernatural God would be an anthropomorphic metaphor for my intangible rules. Not too bad really, if you remember its limits as a metaphor.

God the Spirit

Street version: the Holy Spirit is some kind of spirituality, ethereal, the source of inner promptings that cause some people to do things which turn out great.

My version: In human society, the implacable long term (many hundreds of generations) result of the four rules above is collaborative communities and merciful personality types.

In the medium term (tens of generations) violence and coercion have given selective advantage in many circumstances. But the longest term outcome is the slow and inevitable creation of increasing networks of collaboration, i.e. the creation of widespread circumstances where a propensity to violence is a selective disadvantage.

Note the bit of dualism here: both coercion and collaboration give selective advantage. But the one destroys what the other creates. You can’t have destruction before creation, and in the long term, creation is greater than destruction. Destruction has a shorter time horizon than creation does.

I didn’t make the clothes on my back, my car, my house, my fridge nor the food in it. Other people, vast numbers of them, worked together to give me that stuff, in exchange for the work I did doing my specialty that I gave to a relatively small number of people. It can’t be denied that the web of global collaboration is much greater now than it was a hundred generations ago. The degree of our specialization and interdependence is astonishing. Look about you. Nearly everything you see is the result of collaboration.

Thus the character type that is being selected for, in the long term, is one which is capable of inducing collaboration even in its enemies. It is capable of negotiating fair agreements with perpetrators in the face of past traumas and injustices. In other words it is merciful, and able to forgive, and appreciative of incompatible points of view in the community.

Interesting that the implacable logic of evolution should select for the most placable, merciful, forgiving, and yet insistent character type.

My apologies, I’m going by leaps and bounds here, there’s a ton to be said, I’ve written a whole book about it. Chapter 2 of The Healer Messiah calls that character the Holy Spirit. On a thumbnail, the argument is that we should want a covenanted relationship with our enemies, with those who continually offend us. That is God’s Spirit revealed in scripture. We are children of that God when we too breathe that spirit.

It is not a given that we’ll make it to the heaven of the beloved community. It is unclear whether the violence that has been bred into us—for in the medium term it has been very successful—will result in our destruction before we have the time for the beloved community to supplant more violent forms of social order. But that’s our agenda, those of us who have chosen life.

Back to the street: yeah, the Holy Spirit is a character type, which we are (barely) capable of housing, the image/representative/Spirit of God, and which causes us to do things which turn out really great, unless they get us killed, but even then it’s worth it for the long haul.

God the Son

Street version, type evangelical: Jesus is God, God who on the cross paid for our evil and reconciled us to Himself. Jesus’ miracles and above all, resurrection, are proof of his being God.

My version: The very idea of Jesus is incredible: someone who is both God and human. Might as well say both infinite and finite, both one and many, he’s a walking logical impossibility, marking that this story gainsays the logic of power. Power is the ability to control the situation. That’s what Jesus gives up. The Jesus story calls the weakness of human relationship the power of God.

In Jesus we meet God in humanity. Here there are just too many things to say: Jesus as symbol uniting God and humanity, Paul saying that Jesus is the prototype, the new Adam, of a restored humanity, Jesus likening loving God with loving one’s neighbor, Jesus teaching us to pray “forgive us our offenses as we forgive those who offend against us”, and on and on.

In the gospels and in Paul, Jesus wholly incarnates God’s spirit.

AND to take this disturbing language to its social conclusion, Paul claims we are to be like him, in the church, embodying the spirit of God in our relationships to each other. That is, like this God revealed in Jesus, we do not attempt to control, we ask each other insistently for what we want, and we will die rather than coerce. Jesus is a God who risks the cross rather than use power over us.

The Spirit is what ties Father to Son. The implacable is tied to the cross by the power-renouncing merciful forgiving patient and insistent nature that the implacable selects for.

So in contrast to the street version, the cross is not Jesus’ payment for our sins in a ledger slaking the wrath of God. The story of Jesus on the cross is a story about us, us as victims, accepting the cost of the trauma inflicted on us by perpetrators—who are also us. Nobody can bring our dead back. The cross is the price borne by victims who rise above their trauma, and want a relationship with their offenders who can’t possibly pay the price themselves, because they did not suffer the irrevocable loss.

Giving thanks to Jesus for his accepting the cross is language for our thanks to each other for accepting the remaining unrestitutable costs of the traumas we have caused each other, and wanting a relationship nonetheless. So yes, reconciliation is the goal, but not by a payment done by some third party long ago—this is personal.

That's the God I believe in.

Violence Prevention

Can confrontational communion survive competition with violence? Our current nation states are in thrall to the idea that the only effective rejoinder to violence is violence. Were there a nation that had a different vision, a nation that was a "beloved community" based on confrontational communion, what's to prevent its violent neighbors from taking over? I want to point out three possible reasons why they would or could not, and discuss the last of the three.

The classical reason is profit. Confrontational communion is highly synergistic, efficient, productive. The violent group might wish, for profit, to trade with the beloved community, and be persuaded that violent takeover would destroy the productivity.

A second possibility is what The Healer Messiah calls ignition--that the leadership of the violent group, aware of the synergy that is strong in every society including theirs, could be brought to recognize the superior path of the beloved community, and be inspired to emulate it within their own society.

But ignition risks the cross. It risks that the leadership of the violent group refuses to dare the loss of control inherent in confrontational communion. The beloved community must have a way to avoid the dangerous case of being in direct competition with a violent group who wants to control them. The beloved community must have a way of reducing the probability of the emergence of dominant violent leadership in other nations. The beloved community must have a way of reducing other people's pathological dependency on violence.

This third possibility is what I want to dwell on today--call it violence prevention. The beloved community can act now, to prevent the future emergence of powerful violent people who have a need to be in control.

The traumatized often become traumatizers. Those who have been on the receiving end of the power of violence often live lives defined by the limits that were imposed on them during the time of their trauma. Their lives are permanently trapped in a future they did not chose, they did not want, that was imposed on them. They have reason to believe in the power of violence. Some of them, in their determination never to be outgunned again, spend their lives accumulating the means of violence. They have a deep-seated need to be in control, and become dominators.

I think this is the reason Jesus so emphasizes concern with the poor, the marginalized, the powerless, the oppressed. Relief work, such as helping refugee Syrian children deal with the trauma they have experienced, is not just a moral virtue. It is a strategic necessity for the beloved community.

To the degree that we can heal the trauma of violence, to the degree that we can demonstrate to the traumatized that the world is also a place that loves them, that is willing to share with them, that does not need to be controlled in order to keep from attacking them, to that degree we diminish the future emergence of societies where large numbers of people have the need for dominant control wired so deeply into their psyches that they cannot respond to ignition, or even to friendship, without seeing their traumatizers eyes in every face. In sum, we must show them the face of God, for they have seen the face of hell.

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Southern Cross

© John Fairfield at rruuaacchh.org

...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...

The Southern Cross banner and flag acknowledge the failure of America to deal justly with black Americans since the founding of this country, the historical and ongoing trauma experienced by the African American community, and our determination to rectify the situation.

The Southern Cross banner (above) and flag (below) can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please acknowledge this site.

© John Fairfield at rruuaacchh.org

I'll go after the drones, you go after the vests, OK?

We, the faithful of our different traditions, must unite against a danger dominating each of our traditions.

Our different belief traditions often compete. Muslims versus Christians, Hindus versus Sikhs, secularism versus belief, and many more. Debates, missionary efforts and political opposition contribute to a logic of competition.

That's not the work we must be doing, that's not the battlefield.

The real danger is faith in violence and coercive control as the fundamental guarantors of our security.

I see that faith in the actions of terrorists, and I see that faith in some actions of many governments. I don't care if they're using drones or suicide vests, their faith that their group's identity, dignity and security can ultimately only be defended by coercion is, if you'll excuse my Christian language, an idol, a false god to which we sacrifice our children.

We do need to defend ourselves against coercion. But not with coercion, nor with appeasement.

Worse: these worshipers of coercion claim orthodoxy. They are often characterized in the media as strict, fundamental, and somehow the most orthodox and extremely faithful interpreters of their tradition. Wrong: they are unfaithful, and nowhere near as extreme as us faithful. They have not understood their tradition deeply. They include respected imams, pastors, rabbis, priests and other religious leaders who justify violence and the projection of military power.

These people are not evil, usually they just don't see any realistic alternative. Just like us, they honestly and genuinely want to protect the weak from the strong, the oppressed from the oppressors. They hunger for justice. And within limited conditions, the rule of law works--the presence of police with overwhelming coercive force can protect the public. But the rule of law only works within groups having a public consensus. It doesn't work between groups where there is no consensus.

Our planet has vast and bitter experience with the costs of violent struggle between groups, but people continue in it for lack of an alternative. They see only the choice between control, coercion and dominance on the one hand, or deception, appeasement and avoidance on the other. Fight or flight. And sometimes fighting, or fleeing, is appropriate. But what they don't realize is that their tradition, any of our traditions, offers a way for conflicting groups to utterly transform their relationship to each other, an alternative devoid of fight or flight, through which there is real, earthly security, and that is applicable in very dangerous situations. Nothing is guaranteed, but this alternative offers better chances of justice than what can be attained if we're limited to fight or flight alone.

Our job, the job of those of us who have learned from our traditions how to transform enemies into trustworthy opponents within a just relationship, is to convince people that this alternative is real, and to show them how and when to use it. The only way our riven planet will be healed is if those who have faith in coercion are offered better security.

As an American Christian I don't have the standing, the language, the stories, or the cultural knowledge to speak to Middle Eastern terrorists. But I do to American Christian supporters of military control. In our interfaith alliance, each of us will be tasked to do our intrafaith work, to speak to those within our own tradition who put their faith in coercion. If you're a Middle Eastern Muslim: I'll go after the drones, you go after the vests, and let's support each other, OK?

This is an interfaith call to arms! The faithful of all traditions must collaborate to show how conflicting groups can create productive and just relationships to each other, preserving their identity without coercion or appeasement. We must combine the wisdom of our different traditions, to study and evaluate and above all use it. We must support and learn from each other. And each of us must speak to our own, to teach them how to be faithful, and live.

Contact me, john@rruuaacchh.org. We need each other.

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N.T. Wright on Marriage

I really like N.T. Wright's broadly stroked sketch of the whole Bible, save for the conclusion at the end, where to me he abuses his own argument, and ends up not following his own wisdom.



He mentions sea and dry land, and animal/vegetable, and heaven and earth, and marriage between man and woman, as symbols, signposts pointing towards something profoundly true. Blazed across the whole Bible is God's attempt to reach out to God's offenders, to establish a marriage, a covenanted relationship, with those who are offensive. There is something complementary in the relationship between opposites, between the infinite and the finite, between heaven and earth, between God and God's enemies, between us and ours. Out of their confrontation within a marriage something can be born that wasn't in the cards for either one alone. It is the supreme act of creation.

All good. Language often pulls metaphors out of something visceral whose functional logic parallels that which is being talked about. For example, we might say "we're all in the same boat, don't rock it" using a physical analog to describe a social situation. Indeed every marriage between a man and a woman is a symbol of complementarity, of the productive coming together of things that are radically different, and of the commitment it takes to make that complementarity work.

But that doesn't logically imply that gay marriage is wrong. Just that gay marriage isn't as strong a metaphor for the commitment and value of a complementary relationship, as is hetero marriage. We don't conclude from the truth of "we're all in the same boat" that we shouldn't "think outside the box." A good metaphor doesn't amount to a normative claim. Rather, this overarching biblical theme of the value of difference implies we must forge a committed relationship with those whose perception and experience of the world is radically different from ours. Within the warm community of the church, we commit to confrontation, transparency and struggle with each other over our differences, and to depend on each other's different perceptions in our mutual discernment of what to do next in healing this world. It is the supreme act of creation.

I can't breathe

I've been reading John Lewis' Walking with the Wind, his first-hand account of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Lewis' writing is honest, personal and very real. The non-violent movement convulsed the nation and broke the back of legal segregation in the deep south.

But by the end of chapter sixteen, after the movement had endured all the beatings, shootings, teargas and bombings of the Freedom Rides and Birmingham and Mississippi and Selma, Lewis writes (pg 347):

Something was born in Selma during the course of that year, but something died there, too. The road of nonviolence had essentially run out. Selma was the last act.

...

We're only flesh. I could understand people not wanting to get beaten anymore. The body gets tired. You put out so much energy and you saw such little gain. Black capacity to believe white would really open his heart, open his life to nonviolent appeal, was running out.

Sixty years later, what does The Healer Messiah have to offer the people of Ferguson, or New York, or dozens of other communities? Is there any wisdom beyond nonviolence? Is there a reason why the movement of the 60's ran out of steam? What should be done now?

The movement attempted to use the federal government to force the southern states to end segregation. They built on Supreme Court decisions declaring segregation unconstitutional in education and in interstate commerce. Their strategy was to generate political momentum that would force the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to intervene against southern states to uphold federal law. 

State troopers and local sheriff's departments often attacked the movement with dogs, fire hoses, savage beatings and brutal mass arrests. By Lewis' account, the political impact of the horrific TV footage of the peaceful marchers' fate on the bridge out of Selma forced the Federal government to send federal troops, federal marshals, and the FBI to protect the marchers from the sheriff posses and the populace as they walked through the hate-laced countryside from Selma to Montgomery.

Their strategy worked, in that it attained its goal of forcing southern states to end legalized segregation. Their nonviolent courage ignited the nation, and the widespread political support they inspired resulted in the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 and US Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On page 349 Lewis writes 

Now we needed to deal with the subtler and much more complex issues of attaining economic and political power, of dealing with attitudes and actions held deep inside people and institutions that, now that they were forced to allow us through the door, could still keep the rewards inside those doors out of our reach. Combating segregation is one thing. Dealing with racism is another. [emphasis mine]

In short, the movement hadn't set out to heal its enemies. The State of Alabama, and the Klan supporters who signed up for the sheriff posses and cheered the club-swinging mounted police, were forced by the feds, not healed.

The Healer Messiah asserts that our only salvation is our enemies' salvation. Our only healing is our enemies' healing. The movement's great but limited results weren't a failure of nonviolent tactics, but were a result of the limitations of their strategy. I'm not saying what they did was an error—they had an opportunity to force the system to behave by its own values, and they seized that opportunity. Their courage ignited many in the nation, and they took a giant step in the right direction.

But there is work left undone.

The way forward is to raise our strategic sights to the healing of our society. We must heal each other. By that I mean inspire each other into the kind of relationship described in The Healer Messiah as a confrontational communion, not a melting pot. It is a daunting proposition, but there is no other final solution. Our weapons are courage, hospitality, humility, mutual inspiration and perseverance. May God, whose spirit we can breathe, help us all.

photo credit: cropped from eventphotosnyc via photopin cc

Addendum: the following is my contribution to the conversation about the structures that have us stuck. I have little experience here, in particular I'm neither black nor a policeman. I offer it humbly, perhaps it will be useful to you.

The logic of police interventions is to control. This is so deep as to be unquestioned. It goes down to the bedrock of the need for the state to have a monopoly on coercive power if it is to protect the weak from the strong. In this logic, control is a virtue of police. 

During an interaction between citizens and police, if the police see the citizens as docilely accepting police control, usually all goes according to well-established processes and safeguards. But to the degree that the police feel their control is not accepted, they impose greater levels of physical control. They escalate. In extremis, they'll kill.

But a virtue of the oppressed is to defy the control of the oppressive system.

Many young black men project a defiance of control, in their stance, their dress, their language and their attitude. This defiance is a virtue of the oppressed. They reject the unfair system under which they suffer. Their every gesture expresses that dignity—their rejection of the system. It's the same reason Palestinian's throw rocks at tanks—a matter of dignity.

Blacks are angry and frustrated at living with unfairness. Whites fear those who have such a demonstrably and historically well-founded grievance against them. The expectation of conflict is all it takes for police to feel a challenge to their control even when there is none.

The virtue of control, the virtue of defiance, overlaying fear and anger. That's how Ferguson, and many other communities, are stuck. This is going to be a long haul.