Psalm 149

Reading the text is always an unpredictable process ... sure, we can sort of determine what the "original" intent might have been, sort of, but it's our response that's most telling.

I've read Psalm 149 a good many times, with thanksgiving and with reservation, because of the violence ... biblical violence in the hands of the powerful is, at best, dangerous; but perhaps it can be read in another way, and that's what struck me this morning.

V.6, "Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands."

Yes, in the eager hands of the already-powerful, such a verse can be disastrous. The Erik Princes of this world love this kind of stuff, and exult in the love of "arms for christ."

Yet as I read it this morning, it reminded me that our praise of God can never be separated from the tasks at hand, the tasks of living and caring for what it is right and good, promoting the wellbeing of a society, and especially defending those whose voices have been muted by the powerful.

The text goes on: "to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, to bind their kings with fetters and their nobles with chains of iron...."

I think of Bonhoeffer's fateful decision to participate in the bomb plot to kill Hitler, which, of course, is an extreme measure, but Bonhoeffer knew full well that love for the nation, for the Jews, now required a dramatic move to remove the source of the nation's ills.

I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., who made clear that violence was never to be offered to violence. But the text makes clear, I believe, that in the struggle for right, there can be no laying downing and simply taking it.

The Civil Rights demonstrators, while refraining from proactive violence, made it clear to the nation that Black People would not longer "take it," but in their determination to cross the bridge or to order a coke at the local drugstore counter, they "violated" the social boundaries and put chains on the powerful.

Lots of folks told them to go back to church and pray, put it into God's hands, and God would sort it all out. But it became evident that God's hands were tied by the powerful representatives of the Jim Crow, and all the prayer in all the world wouldn't open up voting rights or french fries at the local lunch counter. But only a forceful presence that dared to cross the lines and confront the lies.

Well, the upshot of this is both complex and simple: to praise God with our voice is meaningless unless the sword is in our hand, ready to clear the way, make straight the way of the LORD, and put into chains those forces and ideas that make a mockery of religion and love to hurt the weak.

And, that a sword in the hand, always dangerous, has to be linked to praise, lest the sword become a law unto itself, and violence for good simply becomes violence.

So was my reading this morning of Psalm 149.

I Was Feeling Good Until ... Joshua 6.21

It's a good morning.

My wife is back in town, and me little heart is happy.

As with most mornings, the Daily Lectionary ... the Bible ... you know, THE BIBLE ... which I've studied for most of my life, taught to so many, and from which I've preached endless sermons, some of which were even pretty darn good. Ha!

But, as of late, I'm reading with careful eyes ... and things are hitting me hard ... like this morning's piece from Joshua, with Jericho in ruins, and Joshua says: Take all the valuables, the gold, silver and bronze, and we'll put them into the LORD's treasury, but as for everything else, everyone else, man, woman and child, dogs and cats, cows and goats, devoted [what a word to use] for destruction. Death, m'boys, death; carnage and destruction, kill 'em all ... they don't deserve life; their land is our land. Preserve Rahab and her family; she helped us. But as for the rest, kill' em. As for the city, burn it. As for the future, cursed be anyone who tries to rebuild it. 

Oh dear, what can I say?

There was a time when I would have said: Blood and terror, but such were the times.

These days, I simply say, Blood and terror ... and horrible and hideous ... yes, this happens; this is what nations do to one another; and every nation says that it's their god who commands it, who commends them for it; a god of unrelenting violence who finds blood rather tasty. And for those who care at all about this earth, about life, a word of rejection is needed here. A word that puts material like this into a museum, into a display of sadness, titled, this is what people do when they misconceive god.

Sadder, still, what this bloody business engenders in many who read it ... the Puritans and early Americans who saw the Indigenous Peoples as Israel looked upon the citizens of Jericho ... and down through the ages, as European Christians colonized the world, wiping out tens of thousands of people in a heartbeat, if not by sword, then by disease, and enslaving millions, devoting to a life of unrelenting cruelty and sorrow. Yuppers! The LORD is on our side, and the sword is the way of the LORD. 

I'll not do a Thomas Jefferson on the Bible, with cut and paste ... to make it more "sanitary" and pleasing. No, this is part of the Sacred Text, it's there, and I have to deal with it.

But no longer will I offer justification for it, or try to make it a metaphor, or allegory, or anything like that No, not at all. 

It's just horrible, hideous, miserable and unworthy of the Creator of the World. That ancient Israel should conceive of itself in this kind of blood, and by the sword is not unusual; this is how nations behave. But it's not what God commands or commends!

But that Jews today, and Christians, and anyone else, of whatever creed, who read this for justification of violence and domination, is the greater horror, and the greater crime against God and God's Creation.

It was hard to read today ... I was feeling good, and then this dirty little ditty, if you will ... that the way of the LORD is the way of the sword ... and if Joshua had the temerity to curse those who would try to rebuild the city, perhaps a curse upon those who take up these texts of violence and use them to justify their laws, their guns, their violence, their domination.

But, then, no curse is needed.

Because those who live by the sword die by it. The Bible says that, too, sort of. Whoever wrote that piece (Aeschylus) knew the story, and when Jesus quotes it (he quotes a Greek philosopher, rather than someone from his own religious tradition), he, too, knew the story, better than any of us. 

Now is not the time for me to say: the sword is the device of hell, not heaven; that "death to all" is the cry of the demented, and not the Word of the LORD.

For God so loved the world, that God gave ... upon this hangs all the Law and the Prophets ... and by such is how I read the Bible.

Madness and Blood in the Bible - Exodus 32.25-29

There is much in Scripture that I love, much that I find instructive, much that deserves to be read and pondered again and again.

And then, this:

²⁵When Moses saw that the people were running wild (forAaron had let them run wild, to the derision of their enemies), ²⁶then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Who is on the LORD’S side? Come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. ²⁷He said to them, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.’” ²⁸The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. ²⁹Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the LORD, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day.” [Exodus 32.25-29].

What was Moses thinking?

Taking out on the people his own frustration and anger, justified as it might have been, but to raise up a priestly horde, self-ordained, with the blood of a son, a brother or a friend? Madness!

A fiendish scheme, a horrible, hideous, device by which to "prove one's loyalty to God," with a god-forsaken promise of a "blessing on yourselves."

I think of Ahab pacing the deck of the Pequod or Kurtz with his ivory, mad, obsessed, willing the death of others to satisfy some insatiable appetite for revenge, for power.

Horrible enough as it is, how is this read by evangelicals, so many of whom are beset self-righteousness, raging and bellowing against the evils of the world? ... and worse, how this is managed in the hands of self-ordained preachers, many of whom have their own love affair with violence and death?

I don't have to reject the whole of the Bible because of a passage like this, but something like this has to be rejected as an aberrant voice, one of the many voices gathered up in this anthology of faith. That some voices should perceive god like this is not surprising, but always sad ... for there's no way that this can be read with approval.

Read it for what it's worth - an ugly picture of the human reptilian brain ... a version of faith scripted in hell rather than in the saga of heaven.

Disturbing Bible Passage

Today's Lectionary (March 7, 2015) includes Deuteronomy 9.1-12.

As I read it this morning, I was disturbed, seriously disturbed, by the ease with which the writer speaks of "dispossessing" nations, with great cities, well-fortified, "a strong and tall people" ... offspring of the Anakim, i.e., a bastardized race.

But don't be afraid, says the writer, the LORD will go before you so that you may dispossess and destroy them quickly. I chilled when I read those words.

Sure, the writer wants to keep Israel's ego in check by reminding the readers that all of this has nothing to do with their sterling character, but rather God's promise and because these nations are "wicked."

Wicked? You bet. Thus, demonizing a people who are otherwise worthy, strong, creative, talented, with families and farms and hopes and dreams, but they have what we want, and so we're gonna take it, and take it violently, because these people are unworthy to own the land, and besides, they're wicked, because they worship "other" gods, and shame on them, and thus have no right to even exist. Dedicate them for destruction.

I'm in the midst of reading a WW2 novel, featuring a Polish girl held in Ravensbrück and the hideous medical experiments performed on her by another young lady, a German doctor ... who, like all the Nazis, demonized the Poles and other nationalities as "bastardized," half-human, or sub-human, not worthy of life in the Third Reich, and not worthy of life at all.

I think of the Europeans coming to America and looking upon the land as if it were Canaan, and the peoples here were not entitled to this land, because they were "wicked," i.e. they weren't christian.

Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites, Nicolas Poussin, 1625

And, then, of course, slavery - millions of good and decent people yanked from their homes, with families broken, put on slave ships and condemned to a brief and brutal life of harvesting sugar cane or cotton.

But it was okay, you see, because the slaves were "wicked," i.e. not christian, and slavery at least saved them from the darkness of their paganism, and in spite of their slavery (because they were not fully human anyway), this gave them a chance to become christians and go to heaven when they died. That they should live in hell here is fitting, because of their sub-human character and their history of wickedness.

Jesus offers some serious alternatives to this bloody self-justification that to this day undergirds the State of Israel's abuse of Palestinians and America's continuing racism, homophobia, and, as of late, Islamophobia.

And, of course, all of this "dispossession and destruction" of peoples is undergirded by religion, because people doing horrible things to other people need to feel "good" about it, and no greater "feel-good" potion than religion, when twisted and turned to self-interest.

Sure, it's a human problem, spread around the globe and defining virtually all of human history.

But I can't accept any of it, because of what I know of Christ, and because of Christ, it's something that I have to fight against, with all that I have, of mind, body, spirit and strength.

Because God so loved the world ... and in Christ, reconciles the world to God, and the world to itself.

Passages like Deuteronomy have to be soundly and quickly denounced for what they are: lies that we tell one another to justify the most brutal of behaviors toward one another.

And as for me, God never said it ...

Or if God did, then God apologized in Christ ... God got out of the land business, for it sullied God's hands, and filled God with self-loathing, as this kind of behavior always does.

If God said it, then God no longer says it.

If God never said it, then we have to come to grips with the sad that truth that we said it, and still say it, "creating god in our own image," to satisfy our bloodlust and justify our inhuman treatment of other humans, deemed unworthy and wicked.

Christians have to read the text carefully, and so must Jews and Muslims ... every sacred text has more than its share of bloodlust, but also of love and the grandeur of mind and heart ... to either pick up the sword and kill one another in some fit of self-interest, believing that god justifies this violence, or turn the sword into a plowshare, so we can feed one another unto life.

The choice is ours. May we choose wisely.

Evangelicalism, Violence and Abortion

Evangelicalism is a violent expression of faith.

Whether it be the conversion of others and the subsequent condemnation of their religion and life, or waving the flag in heated hyper-nationalism and cheering on the dogs of war, or threatening children with hellfire and brimstone unless they quickly receive Jesus as their personal savior and be baptized, there is violence in the heart and soul of evangelicalism.

But violence demands compensation.

Even the most violent of people create for themselves some kind of an honor code to compensate for their otherwise sad lives.

Evangelicalism has crafted its honor code with a stance against abortion.

In its own backward and upside down way, evangelicalism portrays itself as kindly and faithful, loving and wise, and obedient to the gospel of god.

It's compensation ... and oddly enough, even here, evangelicals cannot escape their inclination to violence.

Even as they defend the "unborn," they threaten violence to the mothers who choose abortion, and to those who offer the procedure.

Ever here, rather than perhaps hanging their heads in sorrow and fleeing to the throne of mercy, evangelicals do the evangelical thing: violence.

Because of evangelical violence, this bizarre honor code is maintained with its own forms of violence - "You see how good we are? How loving of the unborn we are?"

Even as Second Amendment rights are touted from pulpit and podium, the flags of war waved against others who not of their own kind and the social disease of racism maintained as an expression of purity.

Violence on every hand is the evangelical way, and to compensate, evangelicals have crafted an illusion for themselves, that they love and protect the unborn.

And in so doing, unwittingly, have fled from God and turned to the task of their own justification - a decision that never ends well.

Those who live by the sword die by the sword ... those who embrace violence do violence to their own soul, and what's left is a ragged and angry human being who can't shake his or her own condemnation, no matter the honor code they self-create to compensate for their willful and deadly violence against others.

A Gun-Free Nation - We Could Do it!

We could create a gun-free nation quickly ... here's how, as I see it:

1) Remove the Second Amendment.

2) Ban all in-home gun storage!

3) Hunters, duly verified and licensed, would be able to store hunting weapons at state gun-storage facilities, and borrow them as they would a library book. Hunters could go there to clean and inspect their weapons. All ammunition stored there, too.

4) Gun collectors would also store their guns in state facilities. Private collecting would diminish. If folks have a fascination with guns, go to the local museum.

5) Ban gun shows. Outlaw the NRA as a subversive organization advocating violence, as dangerous as any terrorist organization or group advocating the violent overthrow of the government.

6) No private manufacturing of guns - only produced by government agencies for police and armed forces.

6) Convicted of a crime-with-a-gun and it's an automatic 30-year prison term without parole. Possessing a gun on one's person, or in one's car or home, would be an automatic $10,000 fine. Second possession would be $20,000, and so on. Third possession: 30-year prison term.

As a result:

1) The threat-level to our police would go down. Guns would virtually disappear from our streets.

2) People would still be violent, but gun violence would be down dramatically. The overwrought need that some folks feel to "protect" their home would no longer exist.

3) Accidental shootings would cease, and so would circumstantial suicide with a gun. No more children being killed or killing.

4) Passion-killing would cease.

Police would remain armed.

And our armed forces.

We could do this if we took seriously the times and age in which we live.

It's time to leave the 18th Century behind and move into the 21st as a leader of the civilized world.

Thoughts about Peace and Violence

Jesus says to his disciples, Love your enemies.

Here is where we meet the power and depth of love - not a feeling, mushy and gushy, but a way of life, a form of behavior, deeply and wonderfully ethical. The word love describes an ethic that is honorable and fair - as Jesus notes, just like God, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

In the world described here, God has no enemies, but treats everyone with fairness, and that’s always kindness - with regard to sun and rain, two essential components necessary to life.

Of such things, God deprives no one … because God is love.

Jesus then adds to this commandment, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

In a world full of violence, where nation takes up sword against nation, with hardly a thought about consequences; in a world where politicians win elections by promising a strong military and preemptive strikes as needed, Christians have got to do some serious thinking about Jesus, the one they claim to follow.

I sometimes wonder if Christians follow other gods, the gods of war - as history is full of Christians killing Christians, and Christians, and in the name of Jesus, conquering other peoples and even enslaving with hardly a thought.

The great challenge facing Christianity in the early part of the 21^st century is violence, and the place of Christianity in the nations of the world, especially for Christians who live in powerful empires, or are caught up in war zones in places like Nigeria or Sudan.

It’s easy to give in to hatred and war. But Jesus offers us a different way of life. A way of life that fulfills the description of what God desires of us: to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

Dank, Damp and Dark Places

As I write, and read in these morning hours, I'm overwhelmed and saddened by the drift into ignorance occurring in this nation right now. The megachurches have recruited millions who "love Jesus" and know nothing about him, other than the hope that he might help them achieve the American Dream.

Combine this with the far-right's love of military might (all they read in the Bible are the books of Samuel and Kings, along with some verses ripped from Revelation), combined with a long-standing hatred of FDR and the "welfare society" he allegedly created ... sorry, I'm going on, but there are times I feel like I'm slogging through some dank, damp and dark places where hope is lost amid violence, ignorance and a vast self-interest ... I go on too long.