I
The Dilemma, the
Appeal, A Faustian Import
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes
1:9
The author of
Ecclesiastes, the great book of wisdom, reminds us today that joy, struggles and
sorrow, the laughter, and the sorrow, even the tragic of the human experience,
the good, bad and ugly and their implications toward the heart and soul of
humanity demand some notion which will liberate
humanity from its tragic dilemma.
at the expense of the proletariat or working class. The consequences of a politics in service to the aristocracy is one which advocates for wealth and not the worker, increases homelessness, increases poverty, increases the rolls of the unemployed, and a higher education too expensive to afford without student loans. When I look at the various programs at risk in the present administration I see programs which provide hope to tens of millions of people across the nation. A popular notion in media circles is “post truth”, that America is in a post truth, post fact era. What I suggest here is that the present regime is prosecuting a political deconstruction of hope.
The deconstruction of hope, as an ethical and political principle, is the intentional political action, inaction or concern to put at risk programs and policies meant to make the life’s of millions of American life’s better. It is about budgets which cater exclusively to the donor class, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and parties which coopt many in the Church who call themselves Christian, and other institutions as means towards injustice at the expense of the American citizen-worker. According to an article written by David Tagbu, entitled “How Christianity got co-opted and we got Trump, 80% percent of evangelicals pulled the lever for Mr. Trump endorsing his policies and programs, such as an immigration policy which separates children from their parents, seemingly antithetical to the teachings and meditations of the Bible and of Jesus Christ. Of course while the tools may be new, i.e. the internet, computers, the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, which works to shape laws in favor of business interests at the expense of workers and labor unions, etc., i.e. the means to inflict injustice, corruption, unethical practices, sin and evil are not. The Bible is clear regarding the ongoing actions and policies endorsed and advocated for by many in the Church, the administration, its supporters and enablers.
Isaiah 1:17 reminds us
to “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the
fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” Zechariah 7:9-10 “Thus says the Lord of
hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not
oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of
you devise evil against another in your heart” and Jeremiah 22:3 “Thus says the
Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor
him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the
fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”
Isaiah, Zechariah, and
Jeremiah present not just words on a page written as the spirit gave utterance
but more so we encounter the desires and concerns of God in covenant with Israel
and Judah. Throughout the scriptures we see God concerned with the needy, the
poor, the enslaved, those on the margins of empire. Woe to the people or
nation, even a Church which disregards the clear unmistakable desires of
God. If we consider God to be consistent
we should not mistake God’s love and patience as some type of permission
allowing or giving a pass for a disregard of holy and sacred concerns and
desires. There is a day of reckoning
coming.
Jeremiah 22:5-9 reads, But
if you will not heed these words, I swear by myself, says the Lord, that this
house shall become a desolation. For thus says the Lord concerning the house of
the king of Judah:
You are like Gilead to me,
like the summit of
Lebanon;
but I swear that I will make you a desert,
an uninhabited
city.[a]
I will prepare destroyers against you,
all with their
weapons;
they shall cut down your choicest cedars
and cast them into
the fire.
And many nations will
pass by this city, and all of them will say one to another, “Why has the Lord
dealt in this way with that great city?” And they will answer, “Because they
abandoned the covenant of the Lord
their God, and worshiped other gods and served them.”
The covenant of God
with Israel, Judah and I would suggest other nations, like the U.S., who have
received God’s grace, rests in how they treat the other, those on the margins,
the poor, the homeless, the stranger, the different abled, even the children. The
covenant, as exemplified by Jesus is not about the powerful, the rich, or the
mighty. The covenant is not about the aristocracy of empire but the working
class, the proletariat, yet by grace the aristocracy too may enter into this
covenant regardless of the difficulty, reflecting here on the rich young ruler
in the Gospels. A great people and nation who disregard God’s word, i.e. the
covenant, will fall, this is God’s promise. Proverbs 3:34 reminds us that God
has no use for a conceited people, but shows favor to those who are humble and
James 4:6 which reminds us “But the grace that God gives is even stronger. As
the scripture says, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Jeremiah, the weeping
prophet in 29:11 and Isaiah, the prophet in 40:31, presents God’s appeal to the
people of Israel and Judah in their political crisis and Babylonian captivity
to once again trust in God and thus to be hopeful once again. Amidst the
sorrows of Israel and Judah, God honors a covenant rooted in the cares and
concerns of the other and the less fortunate, never giving up on being the hope
of Israel, Judah, and I would suggest humanity
as a whole.
Similar to Reinhold
Niebuhr, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Josiah Royce, which Gideon and
I are reading for class, Maya Angelou, and even James Baldwin, The question for
us today is, “how to respond or appeal to a society, culture and Church in
crisis? The seriousness of this present human condition warrants a provocative
response to our foundational text Ecclesiastes 1:9 and its implications. Surely
this particular text and its implications should not be the fate of human
existence. There must be some means of escape, some route to liberation from
the tragic opera of Faustian import.
II
Living into the Gospel, A Longing for Christ and liberation,
a Hope which Sustains
Maya Angelou said, “I’m
always amazed . . .when [people] walk up to me and say, ”I’m a Christian.” I always think, Already? You’ve already got,
my goodness you’re fast.
She also said, “I’m
working at being a Christian and that’s some serious business.”
The words of Maya
Angelou give me pause as her wisdom unsettles long standing assumptions of
empire, colonization and indoctrination. I encounter Maya Angelou’s wisdom as I
read Philippians 3:7-16, the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi.
Yet whatever gains I
had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I
regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ
Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I
regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him,
not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that
comes through faith in Christ,[a] the righteousness from God based on faith. I
want to know Christ[b] and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his
sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the
resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already
obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take
hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do
not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do:
Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward
the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ
Jesus.
1. Paul Never Identified as a Christian
2. Paul sought Christ, discarded everything as loss because of the
surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. For his sake I have suffered
the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain
Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes
from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ,[a] the righteousness
from God based on faith.
3. Wanted to know Christ[b] and the power of his resurrection and the
sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may
attain the resurrection from the dead.
4. Did not consider himself to have taken hold of Christ but one, forgetting
what was behind and straining forward to what’s up ahead, the Christ
5. Apprehension keeps one humble
6. Because Paul sought to apprehend Christ he brought hope and life to many
7. A Mature Faith
Paul’s longing for
Christ, his intense, even erotic journey for Christ became his hope lived out
and in the process birth of the Church. Because of this hope he nurtured the fledgling
and complicated early church.
The question of the
Christian faith is, “Have you apprehended Christ Jesus and thus a hope eternal?”
Not in the colonizing or capitalist sense, God forbid, but of the soul? Grace,
mercy, salvation, the crucifixion, and even the resurrection are means to the
apprehension of Christ Jesus and not an end to themselves. In the apprehension
of Christ Jesus we find a hope rooted in God’s love, not politics, wealth or
religious affiliation. It is a hope deep in the human soul which becomes the sustenance
and the ground of struggle for liberation from the interlocking oppressions and
systems which daily seek to devalue a sacred Inviolable humanity. Hope works for the day the apprehension of
Christ Jesus becomes manifest and thus our liberation sure and undeniable.
Paulo Freire in a
Pedagogy of Hope, Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (Pause – and I note that
Pedagogy of Oppressed is a band book) writes
“Without a minimum of
hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.
But without the struggle, hope, as an ontological need, dissipates, loses
it bearings, and turns into hopelessness.”
Hope is always connected to an issue, concern or struggle. To see the Cross in this light, the light of
the hope Jesus had for Humanity the Cross becomes a somewhat queer center of
hope with implications we live today.
Chris Hedges says
“Hope has a cost. Hope
is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the
right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing
something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and
incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope
becomes.”
Hope compels Black Lives
Matter, the MeToo Movement, the Poor Peoples Campaign, taking on voter
suppression, an emerging Homeless movement, and those who risk deportation, to
stand, protest, to run for office, to fight for a living wage, and Palestinian
liberation, all, at least for me, reminiscent of those who faced the White
Citizen’s Council, the KKK, and Bull Conner’s dogs of the Jim Crow South.
Hope can be, more often
than not, putting one’s body on the lin
III
"Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve."
-
Howard Thurman
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
The wisdom of Rev. Dr.
Howard Thurman and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the light of Christ,
call us to be mindful of the hope within, that hope deep within borne of God’s
love. We should not fall prey to
disappointment, mistakes or setbacks, these things, mindful of Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King’s words are finite. More so we should live into our highest most
profound resolve in God’s grace.
To close I will read the
words of Howard Thurman -
“Despite the dullness
and barrenness of the days that pass, if I search with due diligence, I can
always find a deposit left by some former radiance. But I had forgotten. At the
time it was full-orbed, glorious, and resplendent. I was sure that I would
never forget. In the moment of its fullness, I was sure that it would illumine
my path for all the rest of my journey. I had forgotten how easy it is to
forget.
There was no intent to
betray what seemed so sure at the time. My response was whole, clean,
authentic. But little by little, there crept into my life the dust and grit of
the journey. Details, lower-level demands, all kinds of cross currents —
nothing momentous, nothing overwhelming, nothing flagrant — just wear and tear.
If there had been some direct challenge –a clear-cut issue — I would have
fought it to the end, and beyond.
In the quietness of
this place, surrounded by the all-pervading Presence of God, my heart whispers:
Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in fair weather or in
foul, in good times or in tempests, in the days when the darkness and the foe
are nameless or familiar, I may not forget that to which my life is committed.”
Keep fresh before me
the moments of my high resolve.
For The Inward Journey by
Howard Thurman, Let Us Pray
