NOR THE HOPE OF THE POOR BE TAKEN AWAY
Today's Old Testament lesson is from Isaiah (50:4-9) and so was last Sunday's (35:4- 7a). I'm still thinking about last Sunday's. I was stunned by it; and I came to the conclusion that, for the past fifty years, my theology has been at least half-wrong. Here's what Isaiah says:
"Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
'Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God,
He will come with vengeance,
with terrible recompense.
He will come and save you.",
Isaiah 35:4
Ahh, don't worry about it. We've taken all the vengeance and terrible recompense out of our contemporary, "enlightened" concept of God. We're Marcionites, heretics, again (or still): wrath is the attribute of the Old Testament God; love is the attribute of the New Testament God. (We can say that only if we haven't read either the Old or the New Testament, but that's a discussion you'll have to take up with your Rector, and I encourage you to do so right away. ) God just loves us and forgives us and, evidently, couldn't care less if we all become sociopaths. It even surprises me to hear myself talking this way. I've been a soothsayer (soothe-sayer) all my life. I want to soothe things over and make peace and let people feel okay about not living in the truth, at least that's what the famous psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a dear friend, once told me. Others have confirmed it. While I was serving as the Transitional Rector of St. Barnabas On the Desert in Scottsdale, Arizona a few years ago, a woman who was a member of a Standing Committee of one of the dioceses in Virginia, stopped to talk with me after a service one Sunday. I felt it necessary to introduce myself since, as I told her, I'm unknown in the Church. When I go to meetings of the House of Bishops, I said, the bishops mistake me for a busboy and order me to bring them pitchers of water. She quickly objected to that perception. "Actually," she said, "you are known, as that soothing bishop." That "soothing" bishop. Could that mean gutless? So, as of today, I'm changing my tune to Isaiah's tune -or Reinhold Niebuhr's tune. Niebuhr criticized
mid-twentieth century liberal theology's idea of God. " A god without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross.
How long has it been since you've heard anyone talk about a just God?
How long has it been since you've heard anyone talk about an unjust society?
How long has it been since you've heard anyone talk about the One turning the other upside-down?
In last Sunday's Old Testament lesson, Isaiah envisions an outrageously different kind of world. God will come with vengeance and terrible recompense to save those whom society thinks aren't worth saving: the blind, the deaf, the mute, the lame, the poor. How can they ever be part of this religion? they asked. How can they ever do business in the marketplace? they asked. How can they ever go to war and kill and die for us? they asked. Their humanity had been reduced to their blindness, their deafness, their muteness, their lameness, their poverty. (We're always reducing people to one obvious thing, currently their sexuality .We can't deal with their full humanity, in which God's divinity might be revealed to us and likely would. ) But Isaiah turns it all around. The blind will see, and they'll see that we're often blind to both the good and the evil in the world. The deaf will hear, and they'll hear that we're often deaf to the cry of the poor all around us. The mute will speak, and they'll find that we're often mute in the face of injustice. Oh, the lame will walk and run and jump and do cartwheels and backflips and just make us feel envious and lame by comparison. The poor will be raised up from poverty , to remind us that, apart from God's grace, we're all impoverished. Blindness, deafness, muteness, lameness, poverty are what we have in common. There will be such a sense of equality and community .What a vision!
That wasn't Isaiah's only vision. He had lots of visions. So did all the prophets. Ezekiel had one, of a valley of dry bones putting on flesh and standing up and inhaling God's Spirit. Amos had one, of another flood that covered the earth, this time of justice and righteousness. Mary, the mother of Jesus, definitely a prophet too, had one, of the reversal of all conditions, particularly of the powerful being brought low and the powerless being raised up. And of all Isaiah's visions, none is more affirmed than this one: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares,/and their spears into pruning hooks;/nation shall not lift up sword against nation,/neither shall they learn war any more." All of the prophets are saying that the present reality isn't determined. All of them are saying that God isn't neutral and indifferent and amoral and up there in heaven looking down on all this, helpless. All of them are saying that God is a just God and will find a way to right what's wrong with this world.
As David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, a conservative with whom I agree about half the time, the whole world, particularly the United States and Iran, is now involved in a contest to define what's right and what's wrong. We have to have a vision of a peaceful world and a just society. "Where there is no vision, the people perish" (Proverbs 29: 18). It's true. The Church must be the bearer of those great biblical visions. The alternative is to go along with and, by silence, contribute to the negativity, the pessimism, the hopelessness, the fatalism of a large portion of humanity. The anxiety of meaninglessness" (Paul Tillich's term) is turned into destruction and death.
Realists want us to believe that certain things are inevitable, particularly war and poverty. War is inevitable we're told. "For everything there is a season,/and a time for everything under heaven.../a time to love, and a time to hate;/a time for war, and time for peace;/a time to kill, and a time to heal " (Ecclesiastes 3:8a, 8b, 3a). I hate those lines, even if they are in Scripture. If you've read the Sermon on the Mount, you know that there is no time to hate and no time for war and no time to kill. And poverty is inevitable we're made to believe. Even our Lord is quoted, out of context, that the poor will always be with us, as if it were the will of God. Isaiah and Ezekiel and Amos and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and I disagree.
Where there is no vision, the people perish, for lack of it. But where there is the wrong vision, the people perish because of it. I, along with the majority of Americans -this is the first time I've been in the majority in a long time - believe that the current Administration's vision of dominance or hegemony or empire is the wrong vision. Because of it, people are perishing, by the thousands. The doctrine of preemptive war doesn't meet the lowest standards of the Just(ifiable) War theory, which theory doesn't meet any of the standards of the Sermon on the Mount. If it's really freedom and democracy we're promoting, invading and occupying a sovereign nation and killing their people and destroying their property is the worst possible way to do it. Oh, the things those in power think they can accomplish with the people's treasury and the people's children. We have to find a new way of living among the rest of the nations of the world.
Four or five years ago, while I was still at St. Bamabas On the Desert in Scottsdale, I got a three-month's gift subscription to "Sports Illustrated." I quickly learned, first, to scan everything, then to skip everything up to the last page, which is a column by an incisive, humorous and, sometimes, quite prophetic writer named Rick Reilly. When I left St. Barnabas, the secretary would send the magazine to me, along with mostly second class mail, every week. I told her that it wasn't necessary to send the whole magazine to me, since I only read the last page. However, she kept sending the magazine, until the annual swim suit edition arrived. That's when she decided that I should only have the last page. She still sends them. Recently, she sent a Rick Reilly column titled "A Survivor's Tale." The survivor is Dani Alon, once an Israeli fencing champ, and what he survived was Black September, September 4, 1972, when a Palestinian terrorist group killed all but three of the Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics. They escaped. The Nightmare continued as nightmares for years, all the while Dani served in the Israeli air force. Thirty years later, Dani happened to be in Munich and took a cab to the Olympic Village, where the nightmare occurred. Here's how Rick Reilly ends that column: "The old fencer is 61 now, and Israel is at war again, and he is sick to death of living by the sword. One of the black September attackers, Jamal Al-Gashey, is still alive. And if he met him? 'I'd forgive him, Alon says. 'He was so young. He was a soldier. I've been a soldier too. We have to make peace. All this bloodshed only leads to more bloodshed."' An Israeli Jew lives the Gospel of another Jew, one who lived his own two thousand years ago, Jesus. It's time we all live it.
Here's another of Isaiah's visions, and I say it's for America:
"No more shall there be in it/
an infant who lives but a few days,/
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime.../
They shall build houses and inhabit them;/
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit./
They shall not build and another inhabit;/
they shall not plant and another eat.../
They shall not labor in vain,/
or bear children for calamity "
Meanwhile, in America, one in every six children is poor. That's thirteen million children. Thirty-six million people live below the poverty line (which hasn't been adjusted in forty years). That's more people than there are in the nation's most populous state, California. Forty-seven million people don't have any health insurance. Wages are going down and benefits are being reduced or eliminated. And on and on. The middle-class republic is dying. Meanwhile, we spend billions per week on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, by cutting domestic programs, make war on many of our neediest citizens. But, of course, we're counseled never to mix politics and religion, which is another way of saying that we shouldn't be religious, boldly religious, and make the world that God loves so much to be wrathful about the one we love so much to be wrathful about too.
In Morning Prayer, there's a versicle and response that should motivate us.
V. Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
R. Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.
A sin of commission is to take the hope of the poor away. A sin of omission is to let others take it away and not raise hell. The prophet Amos was a hell-raiser. He's our model.
"Hear this, you who trample on the needy ,1
and bring to ruin the poor of the land...1
(You would buy) the needy for a pair of sandals "
That's the Old Testament equivalent of hiring someone for five dollars and fifteen cents an hour, the current minimum wage. That's forty-one dollars for an eight-hour day. Jim Wallis, the author of "God's Politics," calculated that, in Denver, one would have to work one hundred forty-four hours a week just to afford decent housing. The House Republicans recently passed an increase in the minimum wage and the repeal of the estate tax which they call the "death tax" with the very same bill. While an increase in the minimum wage would have been grace for unskilled workers, the repeal of the estate tax would have been gravy for the very wealthy and the super-rich. The Senate had no choice but to kill such a cynical ploy. To be fair, the poor aren't a priority for either political party.
V. Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
R. Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.
Passive hope is a negative virtue. We just fold our hands and wish for the best. Active hope is a positive virtue. The activity may take us way out of our comfort zone. But, for the sake of those who, for whatever reason, can't fully participate in the life of our society, we have to be hopefully, positively and uncomfortably active. Our model is those three old nuns who give the IBM management fits about unjust practices at the annual stockholders meeting every year. Everyone who has been elected to represent us in the city, county, state and federal governments and everybody involved in making public policy should be put on notice that the vision of the prophets of Israel and of Jesus, the Christ, is our vision too. Sure, God loves you and forgives you, we'll say; but, since this is a moral universe, God's vengeance and terrible recompense will come to save the poor and the needy and you from yourselves. In a poem called "The Cure of Troy," the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a Nobel laureate, writes,
"History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme."
The Rt. Rev. John S. Thornton
St. Mary's Church
Eugene, Oregon
September 17, 2006