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empathy

July 4, 2018

Faith Thinking Aloud »

“They brought it upon themselves.”

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A recent letter to the editor complained that our local newspaper had printed six letters decrying the Trump policy of taking children from their parents at our southern border. The writer, doubly annoyed because an editorial in that same edition had also criticized the “zero tolerance” policy, hedged somewhat by offering up a self-absolving contradiction: I’m not in favor of taking children from their parents, but they brought it on themselves!  What I see is the moral equivalent of football’s double reverse: start toward one side of the defensive line, hand off the ball to feign changing direction (we’re not really running that way), then hand off the ball again to, yes, really run that way.

To brutalize a group of people and feel justified in brutalizing them, one must first discredit empathy which is most easily done by telling lies about them. What makes people flee their homes and set off on a hard trek into dangers known and unknown, especially people with young children who will, beyond doubt, be frightened and unsettled? The plain answer is desperation akin to that which forces a family to flee their house which has caught fire, but that realistic answer could evoke empathy and so must be contradicted with slander. Paint these desperate people as opportunists or even invaders scheming to take away from us what is rightfully ours. Portray them as a horde of barbarians or savages so cruel that they will endanger their own children to attack us. The absurdity of such a depiction, while obvious to many, eludes detection by those who despise brown-skinned people who don’t speak English, who become enraged by the very sight of them in their communities or, perhaps, in more controlled reactions just bristle inside.

First dehumanize and other-ize, then blame the others who are not like us, who don’t fit into our mental pictures of our own communities and our nation, whose very presence makes us uncomfortable. “One of these things is not like the others” on the prejudiced mind’s picture page. How can desperate people be blamed for fleeing their homes to find refuge? Draw them as calculating, as people so bereft of moral decency that they would use their own children as shields to protect themselves from justice. It is, after all, about the law and only the law, is it not? No, it is not. Seeking asylum from violence, rape, and murder is not illegal, but when the desperate people fleeing such violence are not wanted, their action can be made illegal or made to appear illegal. Stop them before they reach the middle of the bridge. Jam up the process so they are tempted in their desperation to seek some way around. Do they understand the ramification of what they are doing in their desperation? I doubt they do, but prejudice just knows they have planned it all out.

The parents fleeing three frighteningly violent, destabilized Central American nations (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) are mostly indigenous people whose native language is not Spanish but some other, older on this continent, that most of us have never even heard named. These are peoples the Europeans displaced, slaughtered, or subjugated. They have been here far longer than we have. Without even going into the question of how these nations have been so destabilized (hint: back in the Reagan years, we played a significant role in the process), people who allow themselves to feel empathy can easily see how confusion and naive expectations of asylum add to desperation and the vague hope of somehow finding refuge and being safe. There is a land of safety. The way there may be hard, but reaching it offers some glimmer of hope. If only. So parents come with their children and try to present themselves to the border guards for acceptance as refugees seeking asylum.

But hope is cheated, and the children they are trying to protect are taken from them, shipped like cargo to unknown places, by night in secret. Put into detention camps. Caged. Not touched, not comforted. Damaged for life.  Mr. Kelly tells us this way of treating children should serve as a strong deterrent.

But, “they brought it upon themselves.” How can such callousness justify itself? The law! They are illegals (not a word in English)! They are invaders! They are lesser human beings. Always the abused must be painted as lesser people, if human at all. Call them animals, then cage them. Blame them. Always blame them so we ourselves need accept no blame for what we are doing to them.

It works. It has always worked, and Donald Trump knows how to work it.

Lack of empathy is evil. Without empathy, a person has no compassion and feels no need for any. Without compassion, we become inhuman and as far away from God as people can get. God’s compassion is the driving force of the entire biblical story and, for Christians, the only hope we have in life or in death.

First, it is a lie that the asylum seekers have brought it upon themselves, that they deserve to have their children taken from them and sent off into a nightmarish limbo. All asylum seekers are doing is running out from the burning building their homeland has become for them, from the danger that drives them from their homes into an uncertain future. From a Christian perspective, however, even if the lie were the truth, it would not excuse us from empathy and compassion. Claiming we are so excused from empathy and compassion denies and renounces the gospel we declare we believe. As Christians, we confess that our hope for salvation is based upon God’s grace – that is, God’s unearned and undeserved compassion and mercy – not upon any assessment of what we deserve or have brought upon ourselves. We affirm that God takes no pleasure in the grief or death of anyone. Such commitment to empathy and compassion does not mandate so-called open borders, as Mr. Trump falsely asserts the critics of his policy want, but it does require the recognition of people as human beings loved by God, the administration of justice without cruelty, and humane treatment of the desperate and vulnerable. Surely special care should be taken with children. The tactical cruelty of the Trump administration, which brutalizes children and their parents to fire up the prejudice and hatred of his base and to extort Congress into wasting money on a wall, has no justification in a Christian view of life or in Christian treatment of people. What is more offensive to God than blatant cruelty? Perhaps the answer is pious cruelty that claims not to favor tearing children from their parents’ arms even as it mutters, “They brought it upon themselves,” thereby approving the policy and the damage it does. Double reverse.

March 31, 2018

Faith Thinking Aloud »

Were We There? Was I?

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It is the day, the Saturday, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Dead Saturday.  No, the church does not call it by that name.  It is part of Triduum, the three days of Jesus’ passion.  For him, it would have been Shabbat, but he was not there to observe it. He was dead.  In our society, it is mostly just a Saturday, notable perhaps because the kids are home from college and the supermarkets more jammed than usual because of Easter’s festivities.  There may be dyed eggs to hide and baskets to fill with candy.  For some it is another holiday emptied of inspiration but filled again with the duty of gathering with the family to endure the smiling criticisms and stinging comparisons with more successful offspring of the clan. For others, it is another weekend day alone because others are busy with family things.

This morning with coffee I went back to Maundy Thursday 2009 to read what follows, what I had written and preached for that evening.  Sometimes it helps me to look back and listen.

Were We There?  Was I?

Was I there when Jesus was crucified? The most obvious, unreflective answer is, of course, “No.” Jesus of Nazareth was crucified almost two thousand years ago. But the literal is not always the truest.

Sacramentally, I have been there many times and will be there again with you this evening. In my hands I will hold the symbolic elements of his humiliation, suffering, and death, and by taking those symbols of his broken body into my own living body, I will confess both that Jesus did it for me and, also, that he “had to” do it because of me. He did not “have to” do it, of course, except that he was compelled by his faithfulness to the unyielding love of God for this world and its people. By eating the bread and drinking from the cup, I will admit that I am the reason for his crucifixion in both senses: he did it for me, because God loves me, and he did it because of me, because of my alienation from God and from other people. I am both the beneficiary and the cause of his pain.

This evening, I am there, there in the flesh, as one loved by God and, at the same time, one alienated from God, still divided from other people, and still a long way from being the person God created me to become. So, here I am again, hoping and trusting that this simple ritual somehow brings me into closer contact with Jesus in his passion, somehow takes hold of me and brings home to me that terrible event on which my life, my hope, and my salvation depend.

But the sacramental is not enough. To be there with him, I need to find him crucified in my real world and not just in the peace and calm of the sanctuary, in the familiar words and actions of the sacrament. A crucifixion was very much an event of the flesh. It was torture and humiliation, very bodily. If God’s love and presence were incarnated (made flesh) for us in the birth of the baby Jesus, how much more so in the breaking of the man’s body? His crucifixion is the supreme incarnation of God’s love and presence. Humanity did not just get to see, hear, and touch him; we got to mock, torture, and kill him. We made the incarnation of God’s love suffer and die.

How can we go beyond the sacramental in being there when and where Jesus is crucified? I think we can start by realizing that Jesus suffered not only for this world but also with it. On the cross he represented God fully to us, in is own dying human body, and he also represented us to God, as the human put to shame and suffering in an unjust, often seemingly Godless world. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus of Nazareth dies with – in unity with – all the countless God-forsaken people in our world.

The sacramental is good, helpful, and sustaining, but it is not enough. We need to find him crucified in the real, everyday world around us. Once we understand, once our eyes have been opened and our ears unplugged, he is not hard to find. He’s there, every day, all around us in what theologians call the cruciform. What is the cruciform? Literally, it is anything in the shape or form of a cross, but in theology it refers to the many experiences of life people find themselves forced to share with the crucified Jesus, whether or not they realize they are sharing in his experience and he in theirs. Life is harsh and often most unfair by any reasonable standard of judgment, and people can be cruel. Sometimes people are quite actively and brutally cruel; at other times, they are more casual, even offhand, about their cruelties – dismissive of those made to suffer, of those cheated, of those left out.

The cruelties, brutal or polite, have this in common: they proceed by dehumanizing their victims. Did you notice as I read from the Gospel of Mark how much emphasis the passion narrative puts on the shaming of Jesus? Despite Mel Gibson’s bloody depiction, the gospels have far more to say about Jesus’ humiliation than about his physical pain. Crucifixion was designed as public shaming, to make an example of the rebel and so attach shame to anyone who would consider rebellion against the empire that people would turn away from following him. The would-be leader of the rebellion was to die screaming, cursing, and begging while being mocked and taunted the whole while, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Notice that Pilate is surprised Jesus has died so soon. For the person crucified, death is the savior that never comes soon enough.

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” That song comes from a human experience that is, indeed, cruciform because it was so dehumanizing and humiliating. To be a slave is to be, twenty-four hours every day, less than a person. We even debated the fraction of a person by which a slave should be counted so the slave states could get more voting power without having to admit the unthinkable, that slaves were people.

We are people and for the most part acknowledged as such, though not always. Go and stand with the unpopular, and you may find your status suddenly reduced to the level of theirs. There it is, the link that takes us beyond the sacramental. Empathy that comes from standing with and among as one of them the people regarded as shameful, as less than valid human beings, unites us with Jesus crucified. Empathy speaks of suffering shared not just pitied. We can indulge in pity from a safe distance, but true empathy requires interaction, dialogue, and identification. Jesus branded himself a sinner by hanging around with sinners, treating them with respect, and sharing the scorn they received from the commendable people.

At the Lord’s Table, I know anew that I am not one of the commendable people, those who live exemplary lives. Jesus made a practice of pointing out to the virtuous that they were not so commendable as they pretended to be. They were playing the role of exemplary people, and so they were actors, role-players, for which the gospels’ term is hypocrite. Here in the sacrament, I know again as I receive the symbols of his humiliation, that Jesus endured it willingly both for me and because of me. There is nothing commendable in my receiving the bread and wine, but there is grace, and there is hope. I believe there is also a challenge and a calling. As the followers of Jesus who put our trust in him, we need to be there, where he is being crucified. We can be there with him when we stop playing the role of exemplary and commendable persons and, instead, enter into the shame and grief of people whose experience of life is cruciform. For where they are, there he is also. Amen.

February 14, 2018

Faith Thinking Aloud »

Circumstances Don’t Matter?

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It’s Not Your Circumstances that Matter
But What You Do with Them
The Help and Harm in this Common Saying

The Potentially Helpful

In my ragged copy of a 1969 book, Journey to Freedom, I find a quote from Tennessee Williams’s, Camino Real, in which one character (Quixote) tells another (Kilroy), “Don’t! Pity! Your! Self! The wounds . . . the many offenses our egos have to endure being housed in bodies that age and hearts that grow tired, are better accepted with a tolerant smile . . . Otherwise what you become is a bag full of curdled cream – leche male, we call it – attractive to nobody, least of all to yourself! Have you any plans?” Kilroy answers, “Well I was thinking of going on from here.” Quixote responds, “Good! Come with me!” (Dowdey, 25,26)

The idea is at least as old as Stoicism: don’t let anything that happens outside you touch and hurt your soul. The common versions might be expressed as, “Don’t let life get you down,” and, “Your life is what you make of it.”

Surely self-pity is a trap – in John Bunyon’s allegorical terms (The Pilgrim’s Progress), a “slough of despond” that, as we say, bogs us down. As long as we remain stuck in this bog of self-pity, we go nowhere. So, very often in life, what we do with our present circumstances determines whether we go on from there.

Bravado’s overblown version of the indomitable human spirit finds voice in William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus.”

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

The call to rise above our circumstances and live again with courage can, indeed, be inspirational and may even be just what we need to hear from ourselves at certain dark times in our lives. Self-pity is a bog, and it will in time repulse other people, even friends, pushing them away from the one wallowing in that bog. We do need to go on from here, wherever here may be when we get stuck, but I do not believe we need to go on unmoved, untouched, unhurt. Self-protection, self-insulation, can become as dangerous as self-pity.

The Personal Danger: Hardening

Part of Paul Simon’s lyrics for the song, “I Am a Rock”:

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain.
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.
I am a rock
I am an island

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried
I am a rock
I am an island

. . .
And a rock feel no pain
And an island never cries.

If I won’t let myself feel my own feelings, how will I empathize with anyone else? If I try to make myself emotionally invulnerable, how can I allow myself to be loved? If I won’t acknowledge my own pain, how will I not become hardhearted and perhaps even cruel?

As we mature, we undergo of necessity a certain degree of hardening. We dare not allow every little slight, injury, or unfairness to get us down. It is neither wise nor safe to go out into the world looking wounded, both because the jackals will move in upon us and because friends will move away from us.

Compassion (suffering with another person enough to be moved to care about that person’s plight) requires vulnerability and the strength to allow myself to be so moved, but how much vulnerability is enough and how much would be too much? In the Gospel of John, Jesus uses a Semitic expression that translates literally as something like, “What to you and to me?” (John 2). The idea is that for another individual’s problem to become mine, there must be some relational context that draws us together in the matter. Otherwise, the problem as presented may be none of my business, which is not the same as saying, “I don’t care,” but does recognize that I am not responsible for solving that problem. I find this expression helpful for guarding against being drawn into others’ relational conflicts in which I have no rightful part. Of course, there may also be good reasons for me to accept that I really do have a responsibility within the matter, but the question, “What to you and to me?” asks what those reasons are. For example, a man demands that Jesus tell his (the man’s) brother to share with him properly the inheritance from their father. Jesus asks the man who made him an arbiter between the two brothers, then tells him he would do well to make his priority reconciling with his bother. The relationship has greater value than the money or property, and Jesus will not insert himself into their family dispute.

If, however, I decide that outward circumstances really do not matter to human happiness and should not affect the soul, then I make myself as nearly as possible invulnerable to other people’s sufferings as well as to my own. In so doing, I am making myself less and less human. I develop a “get over it” attitude toward grief. I dismiss concern about injustices. If necessary for self-protection, I blame people for their sufferings: “No one else does anything to you, except as you do it to yourself by allowing them to trouble you.” So the abused and exploited, the many victims of human cruelty or random misfortune have our self-righteous condemnation of their unhappiness added to their pain.

Social Consequences

If everyone is responsible for his/her own life and happiness, then what place remains for concern about social injustices? Are human systems exempt from the demands of justice? If circumstances don’t matter, what need is there to improve them? Let everyone take care of himself (traditionally women have been expected and forced to accept their circumstances as dictated to them, even as divinely ordained).

Two great lies buttress this hands-off attitude. The first is the lie that we are individuals with no crucial relatedness to each other, that relationships are optional, that one’s life and self are completely one’s own. The second is that prevailing social structures and hierarchies are somehow natural and proper. The truth is that the poverty of many greatly benefits the relatively few who prosper from it, and social hierarchies are enforced to maintain and increase that benefit for the relatively few. Most of us who call ourselves middle class can maintain that status only because poorer people suffer to provide us with goods we otherwise could not afford. Until we recognize our interrelatedness and interdependence, we will continue to live in a world of so-called winners and losers, and the losers will continue to suffer for the benefit of the winners while being blamed for their own misery and the futility of their efforts. For this reason, charitable giving (while better than not giving) serves to blind us to inequities and shield the conscience from the unfairness of “the way things are” while stroking the egos of those with money to spare.

For this reason, also, we love the exceptional, the one who makes it up out of poverty, despite discrimination and the systemic heel on his or her neck. “See!” we tell ourselves, “that one did it, and so what excuse have the rest?” From the back of my mind echoes Buffy Sainte-Marie’s question, “Can’t you see that their poverty’s profiting you?” (“My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”).

Conclusion

Is there a conclusion? I suspect that in one way or another we must, each and all, transcend our circumstances. Can the well-off rise above their prosperity to recognize their privilege and so arrive at the possibility of redemption? Can the crushed rise up with hope above their pain and bitterness? Can the grief-stricken go forward in hope without denying their love and the pain it will suffer as long as they live? Can I tell myself not to get bogged down in self-pity without turning and oppressing others with my platitudes about their happiness being their own responsibility and no one else’s?

Abraham Heschel told us the world does not need more people who love justice – the great and wonderful ideal of justice – but more who cannot abide the injustices done to others. Circumstances do indeed matter, and I really don’t believe we should make peace with evil, personal or social. It should matter that a child has cancer. It should disrupt our happiness that a girl is told she cannot become what she could be, all because she is not a boy. It should grieve us that so many women find expression of a truth of their lives in the “Me too” movement. It should trouble us that people have to insist, against the prevailing attitudes, that “black lives matter.” Circumstances do indeed matter!

We do not need to shield ourselves from grief by denying love. We do not need to minimize our love of life when faced with our own mortality more immanently than we expected. We do not need to put on a happy face. I have known couples who desperately needed to talk with other about their griefs, fears, and losses but, instead, protected each other by keeping silence about impending death until one was gone.

Self-pity is a bog we must escape and keep escaping. And denial of our feelings, needs, and disappointments is a fortress-prison we must escape also. Either trap keeps us from each other, from life, and from honesty with ourselves.

 

February 13, 2018

Faith Thinking Aloud »

Everything Happens for a Reason?

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Everything Happens for a Reason
The Help and Harm in this Common Saying

Cry from Distress

“I know everything happens for a reason, but why . . . ?” Anguish is speaking. Life has betrayed a person’s trust in goodness – life’s goodness or perhaps God’s. Fear has displaced confidence. Chaos threatens to take over, and this affirmation of some hidden reason rejects chaos as the person’s conclusion. She or he is badly shaken and deeply distressed but refuses to abandon completely the trust that life makes sense and that God cares. I would consider it wrong to dismiss this cry from distress as merely an empty platitude – indeed, worse than wrong. It would be cold and cruel but also arrogant. The person crying from distress is saying, “I matter, and my life matters. I am not just a passing shadow. All that has been good, all that I have been thankful for in my life, was not a deception or a sand castle built in childish delusion that it meant something.”

“Life has turned against me.” “This hurts.” “I am shattered, but I will not yield myself to despair. I will not give up on life (or on God), and I will not give up on myself. I will stand and affirm, however unsteadily, that life makes sense even though I cannot see right now what that sense could be. I will not give up my faith or my hope, either.”

Such fortitude is to be respected. As an affirmation of life, the cry from anguish, “Everything happens for a reason!” speaks a truth deeper than anything reason or science has to offer. It is an assertion of human strength from within the context of human weakness. It keeps faith without explanation to justify that faith. Defiantly, it says, “No!” to the void and, “Yes,” to the future.

Attempted Assurance

Here we listen to a different speaker: not the person in distress but another seeking to comfort the one expressing anguish. I must speak here with care because the line between compassion and self-protection blurs, and people trying to help and support the anguished find themselves in very uncertain territory where good intentions may be misunderstood and words meant to console misinterpreted.

Psychologists speak of something they call “the empathic wall.” At issue is how much we can afford to let other people’s feelings get to us versus how well we must protect ourselves so we are not too easily drawn into another’s fear, rage, or grief. Witness a room full of infants playing contentedly and watch what happens when one starts to cry. The crying builds steadily to a full-throated wail of distress, but see (and hear) what happens to the other infants. They too start crying in what is the empathic form of music’s sympathetic vibration where one struck tuning fork placed close to another of the same pitch will start the second vibrating. For infants, such empathy is natural and fine; for an adult, it would not be healthy. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes of an incident in the experience of the Stoic, Seneca. A Roman aristocrat lamented tearfully to Seneca that the shipment of peacock tongues from Africa he had wanted for his dinner party had been interrupted. Seneca laughed. (Upheavals of Thought, 309). Why did Seneca not feel empathy with the man in distress?  He considered the problem trivial and, therefore, the anguish laughable. It would not require a particularly high empathic wall to protect someone from sharing anguish over the loss of a delicacy for an aristocrat’s dinner party. After laughing, Seneca could have offered the ambiguous comfort of, “Everything happens for a reason.”

From the standpoint of the person responding to another’s anguish, saying that everything happens for a reason may come from sympathy’s attempt to comfort or from self-protection’s desire to block empathy. The effect is another matter.

As a Platitude

Minus empathy with the anguished, the saying become a mere platitude, a bromide for the suffering that puts forward false comfort with no heart in it. As a platitude, the saying that “everything happens for a reason” falls far short of the gospel, and the hope it offers is meager by comparison. Worse, it can be cruel. Do we tell parents whose child has been raped and murdered that such a grievous outrage fits somehow nicely into the will and purpose of God? Really? God wanted their child raped and murdered? What monstrous God is that? Women who have conceived by rape have been told the conception was God’s will. Is God in cahoots with rapists? Does God give children cancer or cause dementia in even the most brilliant or most loved of people? If so (and I contend it is not so), what justification can there be for grief or even for compassion? If declaring as a truism that everything happens for a reason meant everything, however horrible, happened in accordance with “God’s good pleasure,” then faith could not mean anything better than surrender to unfathomable power, certainly not trust in God’s compassionate love.

Biblically, God is faithful and just, filled with compassion for even the undeserving, and grieved by human misery. In the hands of the powerful, theology and religion became justifications for the status quo and all the systems of power and authority in place for their benefit. In contrast, the God of Israel enters the stage of human history as the lover of slaves and destroyer of systems of oppression which benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. God intervenes in misery, changes so-called destiny, lifts up the downtrodden, casts down tyrants, and transforms the ways of life on earth. Israel’s God is the breaker of chains and destroyer of convenient platitudes that burden people without power in the world. The book of Job protests innocent suffering, human suffering that makes no sense, and rejects all rationalizations of it. Jacob (Israel himself!) wrestles with God and prevails. Abraham and Moses stand up to God’s righteous judgment upon the wicked, and God is pleased with their impudence and so relents, withdrawing punishment. The Bible, even before we get to Jesus, is a book of protest, not an accommodation to the way things are. God does not send Moses back down into Egypt to tell the Hebrew slaves to resign themselves to their subjugation because “everything happens for a reason” that will be made clear someday. Moses must tell them to get up and get ready to move out.

Jesus of Nazareth and the Kingdom of God

Jesus’ beatitudes have been neutralized too often into platitudes. They are not inspirational nuggets of Christian virtue but promises of radical change in this world. Jesus declares the poor blessed, not because he sees some virtue in poverty, but because God is coming to lift up the poor and cast down the rich. The kingdom of God belongs to the poor, the humbled, the grieved, the merciful, and all who look to God with hope for the promise of a world in which love and human dignity at last triumph over power and oppression.

“Thy kingdom come!” is not a plea for heaven someday but the expression of longing for the transformation of earth into a realm of compassion and justice. It prays for the passing away of the status quo of earth’s domination by wealth and power. It expresses the longing of the faithful, especially the powerless, for a world in which nothing is allowed to hurt or destroy life. It longs for the very opposite of what those in charge presently maintain for their own benefit.

“Thy will be done on earth . . . !” voices Jesus’ opposition to everything that happens contrary to God’s will. For him, sickness is not God’s will. Suffering is to be overcome, not rationalized. God’s people are to meet life with hope and courage, not resignation to the way things are and to whatever happens. Death makes no sense to him because it is not what God wants for us, even though we and everything else born into this world live currently under the dominion of death. Look at the evils in life and throughout this world, and believe that God’s will is otherwise! Then act accordingly.

A leper, an outcast regarded as sinful and not merely sick, challenges Jesus’ representation of God’s will: “If you will, you can heal me.” Like Abraham, Moses, and the great prophets, this leper challenges Jesus and calls God out on God’s commitment to compassion. And the impudent leper is vindicated. Jesus answers, “I do so will; be healed.”

People use Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane as the model for resignation to the hurtful and destructive. That’s wrong. There was something Jesus had to do, and he knew it would be terribly painful and humiliating, but he had to do it for the sake of God’s love for this world and its people. He did not give us the right to say of every horrible thing that happens in this world, “It’s God’s will.” No, it is not! As Christians, we believe that Jesus represents God’s will and purpose truly and embodies God’s empathy with us and compassion for us. As the theologian Jürgen Moltmann boldly proclaimed (The Crucified God), Jesus’ suffering on the cross reveals and represents God the Father’s suffering all along since committing to this created world, to Israel, and to the people of all nations and ethnic groups. If God would not simply destroy evil and all who belong to it, then what was left was for God to do but suffer it with us? The Bible presents a God who refuses to go on being God without us, and the crucified Christ represents in his own body what refusing to give up on us means for God.

All Things Work Together for Good? How?

The eighth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans plunges the apostle, the Roman Christians, and us into the conflict between what happens in life on one hand and what God wants for us on the other. Romans 8 presents, not a study in resignation to evil in blind trust that it somehow makes sense to God, but a resolution to live with hope and expectation in a world groaning under its bondage to decay and death. Paul sees the world as given over to its present systems, however futile they may be on their own, in hope for liberation when the children of God are liberated from their own bondage to death. So, yes, bad things happen and will continue to happen until God’s work is consummated and all creation is made new, made as it should be in accordance with God’s will.

What does Romans 8 mean,“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (NRSV)? Does that knowledge not amount to resignation to whatever happens in trust that it will all work out? No, Paul is no champion of determinism but, rather, a proponent of hope. He is not calling evil somehow secretly good, but calling people to faith that God will transform the harm done by life’s chances and cruelties into something better than ever. I call this process “redemption,” not just in the ultimate sense, but in the present sense of taking up our griefs and putting them into the service of something good.

The past is past, and the events of the past are done and gone. Paul is not talking about some divine version of time travel to go back and undo the past but about transforming the effects of the past. Redemption of the hurtful in our past does not make that evil into good but redeems it by turning the effects of the bad toward the creation of something good. It’s not, “Oh, thank goodness the child died because it made her parents much more compassionate people.” No! I refuse to buy into that kind of pious and pitiless sleight of hand. What is grievous is grievous. What is unjust is unjust. What hurts and destroys is evil. We may thank God for the newly compassionate lives of the dead child’s parents but not for that child’s death. The grief remains within the compassion.

I have made mistakes, and I have done wrong I regret. I cannot go back and undo what I have done, nor can I go back to do what I regret not having done. Neither can I “just turn it all over to God” and no longer regret it. How convenient for me it would be if I could, but then how would I change, learn, and grow?  My regret would be wasted. God’s Spirit is not brain wash like the mythical waters of forgetfulness. I can, however, work toward trusting God to bring good out of evil, service out of regret, understanding and empathy out of pain, and compassion out of shame. Please note that I tend to see the good God brings out of harm as turned outward for the sake of other people and not merely for my personal improvement. Is that noble? No, it’s realistic. As Jesus was sent to represent God to us, so he sends us to represent him to others in the world.

Conclusion

While I will never like the saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” nor agree with it in principle, I do understand how it helps people who find in it an anchor for hope when life no longer makes sense but just hurts. I will not accept the notion that evil in and of itself happens for some good reason or higher purpose, certainly not for “God’s good purpose.” I do believe in God’s will and power to redeem the hurtful and senseless, in both the immediate (here and now) and the ultimate (when all tears are wiped away and all hurts healed). I believe that God’s will for us is for good and not harm, for hope and not despair, for courage and not fearfulness, and for life not death. I base this belief upon the primary belief that in Jesus of Nazareth we see the will of God as it truly is, for us and for all creation, and that will is for life and wholeness.

 

September 12, 2017

Faith Thinking Aloud »

The Current Rise of Sin and Evil

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At its most basic, evil is harm. To do evil to someone is to hurt, damage, or destroy the person. I find it helpful to keep in mind this basic meaning of evil, first because it clarifies some statements in the Bible, but also because it helps prevent us from understanding evil only at its extreme levels of intensity or even as a supernatural power of which we are the victims. Nice, respectable people hurt each other with words or sometimes with silence. A look of disgust can do lasting damage. Nations inflict great harm upon other, often weaker nations as we did to Iraq after our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001 but not by Iraq. The terrorist attacks on us did great harm, great evil, and so did our “shock and awe” of supposed retaliation upon Iraq.

The doing of harm can deepen into willful hurting, which may deepen further into the desire to hurt people and even delight in their pain. Then evil becomes malice and practiced cruelty. At such levels, the doing of evil ties into the desire for dominance accompanied by contempt for those who can be dominated and toyed with. Here doing harm, hurting and humiliating, becomes a habit, a commitment, and finally a need. So it is that evil swallows up the people who have thought dominance made them strong and cruelty was their right as the strong. Malice corrupts and destroys the one who surrenders to it even as that person inflicts harm upon others. This observation leads to the realization that evil is bigger and more powerful than we are. It grips, not only individuals, but nations and peoples. It dehumanizes those it empowers, driving them to appalling acts and frenzies of rage and hatred. Witness the men we see on videos screaming into the faces of women they perceive as unwanted outsiders to their “real America”; they seem insane with fury, out of control and out of their minds. They think they are confronting an evil when, in reality, evil is consuming them.

Sin may be the most misunderstood term in our moral and religious vocabulary. It is not the opposite of virtue; indeed, virtue and sin work together very well and fit nicely into the same person. Neither is sin disobedience, however much the Genesis story of humanity’s temptation and fall may seem upon superficial reading to support that definition. Sin is not merely the violation of a law, a rule, a commandment, or a vow, although such violations may result from and manifest sin. Consider the biblical commandment not to commit adultery. What does adultery violate – a rule, a marriage vow, the virtue of sexual or marital purity? No, it violates a relationship and so violates the person with whom that relationship was formed. That is what sin is in its deepest and most basic biblical meaning: the denial of relationship.

Now we may see the two concepts coming together. The doing of deliberate harm to other people requires the denial or corruption of our relationship with them. They are not “us.” They are inferior. They hate us. They are inhuman or even subhuman. They are disgusting. They belong to us as property and must be kept down, or they are outsiders who must be driven out or destroyed.

For many Americans, Donald Trump has legitimized their denial of relationship with people they see as not us, not real Americans, but outsiders who don’t belong here among us. He has made sin appear and feel patriotic, empowering, and right. So he has unleashed the resentments of people who hate being told they should welcome immigrants and understand border crossers, sympathize with refugees, seek to understand Muslims, respect women as equals, recognize skin color as irrelevant to respect and neighborliness, and be untroubled by different languages. By denying relationship, sin rejects empathy and compassion, replacing them with suspicion, disgust, and fear. What begins in Genesis as, in effect, “We will be as gods to ourselves and do not need you, God, as our God,” expands into, “You are not my brother, my sister, my neighbor, my equal, my companion in life.” From this spirit of evil flows every contemptuous name we put on groups of people we reject as having any rightful association with us, unless it be as our servants, slaves, or under-paid workers. From this spirit of evil springs every war waged in presumed righteousness, every delight in killing the despised enemy, every refusal to recognize our shared humanity.

So it happens that Jesus of Nazareth sums up all that God wants from us and for us in two inseparable commands found in the Hebrew scriptures: to love our God wholeheartedly with all we are and everything we have, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and he expands the definition of neighbor to include, not only the stranger, but even the enemy. He sets the affirmation of relationship against the denial of relationship which is sin.

Affirming relationships that have been denied and sometimes corrupted into antagonisms with long and bitter histories is no simple matter, no quick turnaround, no sweet coming together in sentimental love. Loving our enemies requires reconciliation which is very hard work requiring strenuous emotional effort from both sides and tough dedication to getting it done, despite setbacks and likely treachery from people with vested interests in keeping reconciliation from happening. One to one personal estrangements are hard to turn around because resentments have been accumulated. Hostilities between peoples, where neither side has clean hands and taking revenge has been glorified as honorable, are excruciatingly difficult to overcome. Fears and resentments run deep, and selfishness is ever at work. Treachery is always possible, and a single act of belligerence can undo years of work at building trust. Loving our enemies has nothing to do with warm, fuzzy feelings toward people who would love to hurt us. The work of reconciliation begins with recognizing their humanity as akin to our own, desiring healing rather than revenge, and trying to understand their hurts as well as ours.

Donald Trump did not create the currently rising evil. He unleashed it. Neither has he merely exposed the evil to public view; he has emboldened and empowered it so his campaign could feed it and feed upon it. If we would resist the evil and protect its intended victims, we must oppose it actively but take care not to adopt its methods and try to fight fire with fire. We must not dehumanize the Trump supporters, denying relationship with them. As in our Civil War, they are our neighbors, friends, and family members. Understanding people’s actions is not synonymous with excusing them. The history of prejudice in our nation reveals that many people have built their sense of identity and self-worth upon their presumed superiority by virtue of their whiteness, and some of their resentments are tied to perceived violations of that presumed superiority and their right to preference because of it. They see black people, Latinos, and women as cutting ahead of them in line for the American dream. Such prejudices complicate sympathy for them and stifle understanding of their pain but do not excuse us from the efforts, not only because we all have prejudices of our own, but also because we do indeed, like it or not, belong together to the God who created us to live in mutual respect, with commitment to justice and kindness.

The Talmud includes a story in which the angels of heaven ask God if they may join the Israelites in the Song of the Sea celebrating their deliverance from the Egyptian army that sought to destroy them. The children of Israel have crossed the sea on dry ground, but the waters have returned to drown the pursuing Egyptians. Cause for celebration? No, for God replies, How can you sing when my children are drowning, when the work of my hands lies dead upon the shores?

Denial of relationship with other people amounts to denial of God. Rejection of empathy and refusal of compassion open the door wide for terrible evils (great harm and rampant cruelty) without interference from conscience. Jesus launched a counter movement by insisting we do belong together, we are all related within God’s commitment to relationship with us. He gave himself to reconcile us. This is what we believe and proclaim as Christians. That so many American Christians have given their support to the current rising of sin and evil shows how deeply the rejection of relationship has corrupted the body politic of our land and the faith of American Christianity.

In long-standing hostilities, the standard defense against any suggestion of reconciling with the enemies is a litany of, “But what about . . . ?” answered with a recital of grievances and wrongs done by those enemies. Such litanies re-ignite anger even as they deflect any suggestion of self-examination. Such deflection is the use to which the abortion issue is currently put, not to reduce the number of abortions, but to claim high moral ground for supporting the rise of belligerent nationalism and racism with insistence that unqualified opposition to abortion excuses all other wrongs. As long as opposing sides continue to deflect self-examination with, “But what about (wrongs believed to be done or supported by the other side)?” reconciliation is stifled and self-righteousness prevails. Therein lies the power of sin and the grief of God.

July 23, 2015

Faith Thinking Aloud »

No Hot Water

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Day ten. Today is our tenth without hot water. My wife was taking a shower when suddenly the water went cold. We’re thankful her shower coincided with the rupture of our water heater’s tank because I was able to grab my shop vacuum, which sucked up the water from our basement floor before damage was done, and to shut off the water lines in and out of the now useless heating tank, throw the breaker, and call for a repair.

Having no hot water flowing from our faucets is what we now call a First World problem. Millions of earth’s people would be moved to tears of wonder and joy if they could only turn a spigot and have potable cold water flow into their dwellings. For them, hot water would be a luxury beyond belief. Girls walk miles to fill jugs with questionable water which they then carry miles back home on their heads. Water, cold or hot, from a faucet in the home would probably seem to them paradisiacal.

Day ten of taking baths not showers. Day ten of heating water on our kitchen stove to carry upstairs to the bathtub and of washing our hair in a sink (in mid July when cold water doesn’t feel bad). We know how to cope easily with this First World inconvenience. For two decades worth of summers we vacationed happily in our friends’ cabin in the Pocono Mountains without running water on site. All I had to do was load the back of our car with empty five-gallon jugs, fill them at one of the state park’s faucets, and bring them back. Not on my head.

Yes, we had to heat cold water for bathing, washing dishes, and cleaning, but the cabin had an electric stove, a decidedly modern convenience. It also featured an outhouse, but that’s another story.

Why in this hyper-convenient First World of ours is it taking more than ten days to get a new water heater?

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February 21, 2015

Faith Thinking Aloud »

Pope Francis on Ash Wednesday

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Ash Wednesday begins the Christian season of Lent with a call to repentance (turning), and it is custom for many Christians, and not only Roman Catholics, to give up something for Lent as a personal sacrifice. Pope Francis has questioned the worth of sacrifice that provides no benefit for others, echoing the message of Isaiah chapter 58.

“Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (NRSV)

At the heart of the Pope’s Ash Wednesday message is his call to give up for Lent (and for life) what we most need to give up: indifference toward other people and toward God. Evil (harm) comes from lack of empathy with others. Before we kill (actively or passively, literally or economically, physically or spiritually), we first devalue and dehumanize the intended victims. Francis is calling us to the very heart of the gospel where we will find the truest turning (repentance). Of course, it’s easier to give up, say, chocolate, but what good does that do for anyone else, and how does it truly turn a person around in life? To give up indifference (no easy process) is to grow toward our humanity as it was created to become.

I saw in Facebook comments on the Pope’s message affirmations of his popularity with predictable “if only” reservations on important issues: ordination of women, reproductive rights, etc. The Pope is not at liberty to contradict the church’s canon law and remain Pope. One comment noted that Francis is open-minded and so might be persuaded to change his mind on such issues, but it’s not about changing his mind. He cannot change canon law and so must operate within its parameters. A whole lot more than the Pope’s mind would have to be changed before the Catholic Church’s position on issues such as reproductive rights could be reversed or even modernized.

Francis has, however, called all who regard his voice, Catholic or not, to move toward the great change: moving from indifference toward empathy. That repentance is huge, a true turnaround. In making it, we move from sin (alienation) toward humanity, but it is the task of a lifetime not a season. Still, every change must make a start somewhere, sometime, even if only with serious pursuit of a simple question: How can I do that?