KEEP THE FESTIVAL

September 2nd, 2010 by mswora

I Cor. 5:1It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. 2And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? 3Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. 4When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.  6Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? 7Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.  9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. 12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

Focus verse: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

  1. The Christian life is meant to be a Festival, not a carnival, nor an Inquisition
  2. Whether a carnival or an Inquisition, the same sin is behind all other sins at work: “proud” defiance, resistance against repentance and grace & dependence upon God
  3. Our Passover festival is celebrated with bread of sincerity & truth, i.e. openness to correction and repentance, honesty, transparency and mutual accountability (not sinlessness and perfection)

When we looked at this passage over breakfast last Tuesday morning, two questions immediately popped up: 1) What does this passage have to do with today’s baptism and new membership, when its about kicking someone out of church membership?; and 2) How good do we have to be lest we too get dis-fellowshipped or expelled? Since none of us is perfect, wouldn’t this passage set us on some sort of feeding frenzy, at the end of which, no one would be left on our rolls, or in our pews, or…. in the pulpit?

Well, to answer the second question first, today I have commissioned several big, strong bouncers standing in the back who are going to go through the sanctuary this morning taking every known and suspected sinner out of the pews and escorting them out of the sanctuary, and….

Now, why do they seem to be heading for the pulpit first?

Just kidding.

But some of us here have had experiences with just that kind of judgmental feeding frenzy, and sometimes over the oddest of things, like the length of your hair or the color and style of your clothing. All the while that they were fixating on those things, they were overlooking the real sins of fear and hostility that fueled such a feeding frenzy. When I pastored in Kansas, I got to know many who were kicked out of the Holderman Mennonite churches for such alleged sins as having pictures of their family members up in their house or at their work sites. It showed pride, they were told. Some of them joined our Western District Conference Mennonite churches, while others were so badly hurt that they left church all together.

That kind of feeding frenzy is not what Paul is encouraging in us today. He’s encouraging us to think of the Christian life, and the Christian community, as a festival. In particular, the Jewish Passover Festival. The Passover is a festival celebrating God and his work of freedom, redemption, liberation, and the restoration of human dignity from Egyptian slavery. Its celebrated in family, with friends, with the sharing of food, love and faith. An even greater freedom, redemption, liberation and restoration of human dignity is now possible for all of us because of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the final, perfect Passover Lamb of God. We, his disciples, get to celebrate such a festival of freedom, dignity and liberation not just once a year but every day of our lives through eternity.

But somebody in Corinth had turned the new Christian passover festival into a carnival, worse than the most lewd and crude Carnival/Mardi Gras images you might ever have seen in the evening news from New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro. It was so bad that people outside of the church would blush and barf at the mention of it.

But it would be no better if we turned the new Christian Passover Festival into a Mennonite version of the Spanish Inquisition. That was five hundred years ago, when Catholic church officials were prying into everyone’s homes and lives and burning people at the stake who wouldn’t repent of being Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Anabaptist, atheist, agnostic, pagan or whatever. They don’t do this today; the Pope even apologized for it, so we shouldn’t hang it about the necks of our Catholic friends anymore, except to recognize that, in this day and age when anything goes, we are likewise tempted to circle the wagons in a fearful, defensive stance against the world, and to seek security by controlling all sorts of external things about each other.

I suppose that’s why I occasionally get phone calls from people who are interested in checking us out, as long as our church imposes some sort of dress code, especially upon women, and that we don’t do any contemporary, upbeat music. I understand their fears and can sympathize with them. But I don’t think that controlling dress or styles of music will get at the things they really fear most. “Come see the beautiful African clothing, especially around Easter,” I say. “And we have a pretty good worship band, plus a full string orchestra.” But they don’t come. I figure its better to tell the truth and disappoint them over the phone than to have them go through all the trouble to come and get disappointed.

As grievous as was the particular sin mentioned in Corinth, the there is a more grievous sin behind that sin. Paul tells us what it is in verse 2 when he says, “And you are [even] proud!” He means “you” plural. So it wasn’t just a person at fault; there was an entire church faction in his corner. With those words we look beyond the unmentionable sin to the sin behind all sins, the proud, willful, stubborn, defiant resistance to God and his gifts of counsel, repentance, forgiveness and restoration, manifested by pride in the sin and its acceptance. It was the sin of believing himself, against all evidence to the contrary, to be not a sinner.

That sin is uniquely dangerous and destructive because, unlike other sins, it amounts to slamming the door on community, counsel, forgiveness and reconciliation. It amounts to painting ourselves into a corner where the gifts of counsel, of repentance, forgiveness and a change of life cannot reach us, where we would remain alone, thumbing our noses at God and others. Because of his pride in the sin, and not just the sin itself, Paul calls for the de-membership of the Corinthian offender until the fruits of his conduct affect him and confront him with the need to repent and reform. After all, the person in question, by his unwillingness to receive counsel, by his certainty that he had nothing to confess or be forgiven, was already distancing himself from God, the community and its mission.

And, like yeast in bread dough, this defiance of God’s grace was contagious and had begun infecting others with this same spirit of defiance and divisiveness. Others in Corinth were boasting about their acceptance of his conduct. That boasting indicates something else more destructive than the sexual misconduct, as bad as it was: it means that they were turning their inner orientation away from God and toward the world, making themselves actors for hire on the world’s stage, seeking to please society, more so than God. Since no one can act toward all sides of a stage, some will then play to different sides of society’s audience, such as for the right or the left, for the revolutionaries or the reactionaries. When that happens, a bridge club can’t stay together, let alone a church. So, defiance of God’s grace leads inexorably to divisiveness in the church.

And this is just as true if we should also turn the Christian life into an Inquisition. Its just as divisive and destructive whether we’re drinking ourselves silly, or snooping in each other’s refrigerators. Whether we’re committing theft, or auditing each other’s check books. Whether we’re dressing immodestly, or whether we’re enforcing a dress code. In either case, its the same temptation and the same sin: to abandon our trust in God in favor of self-reliance and self-justification, whether through a carnival, or an inquisition.

So, to the second question, How good do I have to be to not get kicked out of the community of faith? Well, that would happen only if we weren’t sinners. Actually, when it comes to God’s household of faith, people really, finally don’t get kicked out. Or they shouldn’t. But people may eventually remove themselves, through this willful defiance I have described, to the point where the community must finally acknowledge their leaving, and grieve it. And the surest way for anyone to remove themselves from the community of faith would be if we stopped being sinners in need of God and each other. Or at least, if we were sure we were not sinners, like the Corinthians and their poster child. In the spirit of I Corinthians 5, church membership is only for sinners.

That’s even what our church’s Mission Statement says. It begins by defining us as, “a community of sinners redeemed from the guilt and bondage of sin by the grace of God and the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ.” No sinless people need apply.

But the other side of the coin is expressed in our annual membership covenant, where we promise each other “...the compassionate giving and receiving of counsel among all members and attendees…” So don’t anyone join this church, or attend it, if you don’t want to start growing from sinners toward sainthood. Don’t join if you don’t want to give and receive help along the way. The old saying, “Every saint has a past and every sinner a future” is the plot line of our worship, our songs and our hymns. Its our life stories. And that of the man who wrote today’s Bible passage. He called himself, “the chief of sinners.”

And that leads us back to the first question: What does this passage, about church discipline and expulsion, have to do with today’s celebration of baptism and a new church membership? Well, look again at the focus verses, 7 and 8: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

At Emmanuel Mennonite Church, our baptismal vows and our membership covenants commit us to those two things: sincerity and truth. Not to sinlessness and perfection, because we’ve probably all missed our chance at those, but to sincerity and truth. The truth I take to be God’s Word. Sincerity I take to mean honesty, transparency and openness with each other in a spirit of care and compassion for each other. In our life-long Passover celebration together, our “bread of sincerity and truth” is made of our willingness to review our lives, honestly and compassionately, by the standard of God’s truth, to repent and make amends however often they’re necessary, to give ourselves and each other as many chances as we need to get up from our falls and failures and start over, and to accept the gracious, compassionate help of our brothers and sisters to do just that. It may not always be wise to spill everything about our lives before everyone all the time. But hopefully, to some trusted people in God’s household of faith, all of our lives are an open book to someone. Without this regular diet of truth and sincerity, our spirits starve and die.

I hope that every time someone is baptized and embarks on a new Christian life, all of us reflect anew upon our relationship with God and each other. Today, Rediet is joining the new Passover festival in Christ, to purge any of the old leaven of hostility and wickedness, and to share with us the new bread of sincerity and truth. She is committing herself to Christ and to us, to join us on the life-long journey of growth in godliness. Let Rediet’s decision today remind us to keep sharing and feeding on the bread of sincerity and truth, of honest counsel, repentance, forgiveness and newness of life. Its a matter of life and death. Especially for those who need it.

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WEEK 14: NUMBERS 25-35; PSALM 14

September 2nd, 2010 by mswora

WHERE DID THEY GO? Where did this all happen? Due to difficulties in locating all the places named and described in Exodus and Numbers, there are three different ideas floating around as to where the route of Israel’s desert sojourn was, and where these places were: a northern route along the Mediterranean, a central route through the Sinai Peninsula, and a southern route which actually would have take the Israelites into the Arabian peninsula. Not having been there, I won’t weigh in on which one is more likely.

For maps of Israel’s 40-year sojourn, and the allotment of the land by tribes, check out: http://www.bible-history.com/maps/route_exodus.html.

Central to this section is Israel’s conflict with Midian, or Moab. Moses’ (first?) wife was from this region, and Jethro, his father-in-law and a priest among these people, had given Moses some good counsel. But now Moab is standing firmly in the way, seeking to block Israel’s advance. After watching Israel’s 38 years of apparent wandering in the desert, the fear of the Lord has worn off and Egypt’s vassal states assume they can keep the Israelites in the desert forever, if not by direct conflict, then by temptation and enticement away from their patron God. Thus the moral/spiritual meltdown around the cult of Baal-Fegor, probably a fertility idol, complete with the sacred female prostitutes (25: 1-3). It nearly worked, and the cult could be uprooted from Israel’s ranks only at terrible cost of something approaching civil war and the deaths of 24,000.

This is the story behind the war of vengeance and near-extermination against Moab, and laws regarding the spoils of war (Numbers 31), meant to prevent Israel from going to war for their own economic enrichment, as their neighborings states often did. For the modern reader, especially one of pacifist, Anabaptist sensibilities, these stories of Holy War, of merciless killing, both of fellow Israelites and their neighbors, including noncombatant women and children, raise some serious issues, to say the least. It doesn’t seem to square with the peace teachings of Jesus. Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills, has done much writing and thinking on this matter, which you can peruse at http://www.gregboyd.org/. Our church’s member, Philip Friesen, has also written a book on this matter, The Old Testament Roots of Nonviolence. I’ll come back to this issue several times as we encounter it again throughout the Pentateuch and the books of Joshua, Kings and Chronicles.

Suffice it to say, for the moment, that Jesus himself treats these documents as foundational to his identity and mission. They were authoritative, even sacred, to him, so they should be for his disciples, as well. They inform our understanding of him and his mission, as well as vice versa. So we must let them question us, as well as us questioning them. The Old Testament presumes that the Giver of life has the right to take it back when it is being misused by injustice, idolatry or violence. We must deal with it. That does not give us the right to make ourselves agents of God’s judgment, because “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (including ourselves) and “the wages of sin is death.” So we come to the Old Testament as those over whom the sword is poised.

Euro-American pioneers who claimed the right and precedent of the Exodus to drive out and exterminate Native Americans put themselves in the wrong part of these stories. So did the White South Africans, and other European colonialists in Asia, Latin America and Africa. We Christians are most definitely not to claim the mantle of God’s  conquering warrior people in our relations to non-Christians and other cultures and nations. In Romans 9-11, Paul tells us that we, the Gentiles, are the wild branch grafted into the tree of Israel, i.e., that we are, in effect, the pagan nations faced with the inevitable coming of new management who would do well to sue for peace and submit ourselves to Israel’s God and his merciful covenant, unlike what Moab and other tribes and nations did. Then we will discover how gracious, patient, merciful and compassionate is this warrior God. As someone else has said, “If God is ‘a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29),’ he is a fire that burns cooler and sweeter the closer we approach him.” More thoughts on Old Testament holy war and Jesus’ assertive non-violence in posts to come.

A powerful and intriguing summary statement of the relationship between God, God’s law and God’s land is posted at the end of Numbers 35: ” ‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.’ ” Here is an interesting angle on sacrifice, especially that of Jesus, God’s final and perfect Passover Lamb, the sacrifice which perfects and completes what the recurrent sacrifices of ancient Israel could not complete (Hebrews 9-10). But what does this say about the history of bloodshed on our own soil, whether that of the Native American, driven out by bullet and bayonet, or of the African slave and his descendant, by the lash or by lynching? Again, this does not obligate us to capital punishment, because the blood sacrifice of Jesus pays for all. Yet we can say that the land remembers what we try to forget. The seeds sown by bloodshed in one generation will bear fruit for generations to come, until we too offer the atoning sacrifices of confession, repentance, reconciliation and restoration.

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WEEK THIRTEEN: Numbers 14-24; Psalm 13

September 1st, 2010 by mswora

KADESH-BARNEA: Numbers 13-14; The Turning Point

The majority report of the twelve spies (Numbers 13) sets off a panic and a revolt among the Israelites, from which their generation never recovered. Some scholars assert that, had they believed the minority report of Joshua and Caleb and continued marching into Canaan, not only would they have cut 38 years off their wilderness wanderings (the first two were necessary for installing the rites, laws and institutions that would keep them from becoming Egypt-point-two), they might have avoided much of the bloodshed they suffered and committed in the invasion by the next generation. For “the fear of the Lord” was still upon Egypt’s buffer and vassal states in the region. Many of them might have fled, or sought peace with Israel, maybe even assimilating into Israel’s faith and governance. By the time the faithless generation had died off (except for Joshua and Caleb), the tribes and states in the land were united, ready and resistant to Israel.

WHAT HAPPENED TO MOSES?

What did he do to forfeit his right to enter the Promised Land? In Numbers 20, we read about another community plague of panic, this time over water, or the lack thereof. God instructed Moses to speak to a certain rock, and it will bring forth water (A biblical parable about prayer to God, The Rock?) Moses seems to have had a temper tantrum instead, speaking harshly to the people, and striking the rock twice with his rod. Small, minor details, it seems, but they may indicate a bigger picture of the state of Moses and a persistent flaw in his leadership, as great as it otherwise was. The Bible interprets itself in Psalm 106 :33: “rash words came from Moses’ lips.” Such weakness would handicap the people upon their entry into Canaan. Here again we see a striking difference between the Bible and other religious literature that took shape among Israel’s pagan neighbors at the time. In the latter category, the founding/leading religious and political figures are usually one-dimensionally perfect, all-knowing, all-sufficient, all-conquering, divine or semi-divine figures. All of Israel and her leaders and servants are, by contrast, flawed and fallible human beings whom God uses, almost in spite of themselves.

LIFTING UP THE SERPENT—Numbers 21

Compare the story of Numbers 21: 4-9 with with how the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth interpreted the story in John 3: 14-15: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Then II Cor. 5: 21 for Rabbi Saul of Tarsus’ take: “God made him [Christ] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

There was something about facing the symbol of their affliction that overcame this affliction. Likewise, God’s incarnation and identification with us mortal sinners through the human Christ is our healing from death and sin.

Numbers 22-24: PROPHET VS. PROPHET, Balaam vs. Moses

Before we consider the stark contrasts of pagan magic and divination with Israel, her law and prophets, the reader must determine why the angel of God is ready to kill Balaam when he is obeying God’s directive to go with the royal emissaries of Balaak. When the angel tells Balaam, “Go with the men, but speak only what I tell you,” (italics mine) it may indicate that Balaam had first gone with a greedy spirit, thinking or hoping he had divine permission to curse Israel for hire. In the Bible’s self-interpretation, this seems to be the case, as Peter points out in his “Second Letter, chapter 2, verse 15: “They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness.” Balaam shows up in other, later Bible passages as a symbol of spiritual power for hire, against the purposes of God. Though Balaam was unable to curse Israel, he helped engineer the curse of sacralized, idolatrous temptation in Moab’s pagan shrines, to entice Israel into the conjoined twin sins of idolatry and fornication (Numbers 25), thus dispelling (temporarily) God’s favor and protection. When Israel went to war with Moab, on the way into the Promised Land, Balaam was listed among the kings and priests killed. Balaam and Moses then become studies, by comparison and contrast, in prophecy and prophetic ministry, that of Israel and her God, versus that of Egypt’s imperial vassal and buffer states and their local gods.

But the story, stretching over chapters 22-24, raises several other questions:

  1. Why would anyone think that a priest or prophet could engineer an effective curse against anyone, let alone a nation?
  2. Why would anyone think that changing the location of the ritual might change the results?
  3. Why would God even show up and talk to a pagan priest, prophet and diviner like Balaam?

The third question first: This story is one clue, among many others in the Pentateuch, that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was already well-known among Israel’s neighbors, considered perhaps as one god among many, or a supreme One above all the others, but not as one friendly to the gods of war, empire, commerce, magic and fertility, nor to the divinized human beings at the pinnacle of political and military power (i.e., kings and queens) who demanded worship, sacrifice and obedience as gods. So YHWH, God of Israel, may have already been a familiar (but feared?) figure to a shaman, priest, sorcerer and soothsayer like Balaam. Balaam may have been like one of the spiritually gifted people I have met who, though not disciples of Jesus, whatever their religion, are more sensitive to and aware of spiritual forces and realities around and within themselves than is the average bloke, even the average Christian. Most of the time, it is a blessing that we are in the dark about the unseen spiritual forces and beings around us, as long as we are clinging to God and under his authority. While this heightened spiritual sensitivity is a gift (which I don’t have), it can also be a curse, if it is sought and developed for reasons of pride and power over others. Come to think of it, this same temptation afflicts Christians and their leaders. With this gift, one might have special insight into the workings and presence of God, as well as of other spiritual entities, forces and movements. For Christians, such gifts are called “discernment” and “prophecy.” But their employment is for entirely different reasons than those of Balaam, who sought wealth, prestige, power and distinction over and against others.

As for the first question, Why would anyone think that a priest or prophet could engineer an effective curse against anyone, let alone a nation? we have to place ourselves into the pagan, pantheistic, primal mindset. In that worldview, the line between the Creator and Creation is not solid; indeed, nature and divinity are one and the same. Thus its not unreasonable, in this worldview, to think that certain human beings, or all human beings with the right rituals, tools and words, would have divine power to curse and to bless, because they themselves are divine, or semi-divine. As Christians we should take seriously our God-given mandate to bless others, not because we are God or gods, but because God dwells with and within us.

Which leads to the second question: How would moving from one shrine or mountain-top to another change the blessing or curse coming from Balaam’s mouth, as Balaak seemed to hope? In the primal, pagan worldview, if all people are divine, and some more divine than others, then the same is true of places. All places are infused with divine presence and power, some more so than others. And some places are infused with the powers of some deities and spirits, while others are the shrines and abodes of others. Like a caller wandering around to get better cell phone reception, Balaak and Balaam hoped they might get a more favorable spiritual event from a different spiritual location. Though YHWH God chose to make the Jerusalem Temple his (temporary) footstool, it was already revolutionary enough, in the time of the Exodus, for him to dwell with a people on the move, in a portable Tabernacle. Then, with the giving of God’s Holy Spirit, God is enshrined in his people everywhere throughout the earth, where they live, love and worship.

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THE (WELCOME) END OF POLITE INDIFFERENCE

September 1st, 2010 by mswora

A Review and Response to Sam Harris’ The End of Faith

(I wrote this review several years ago, and post it now, as it is as timely as ever.)

“You’ve simply got to read the book,” my friend e-mailed me. “It explains so well why we have evolved to the stage where we simply can’t afford religion anymore.”

”I haven’t read The End of Faith yet,” I replied, “though I know that it and other books like The God Delusion [by Richard Dawkins] and God Is Not Great [by Christopher Hitchens] are stirring up a lot of press and passion. I suppose I should. How about we both discuss it?”

I haven’t heard back from my friend yet, but I took him up at his recommendation and read The End of Faith by Sam Harris. If my friend wanted to “save me” or convert me to atheism, his book recommendation failed to do the trick. But I’m glad I read it.

Harris’ argument against any and all organized religion goes roughly like this:

  • Religious faith effectively requires mental and intellectual suicide.
  • This mental and intellectual suicide is dangerous: do this and you could do or approve of anything else (like flying passenger jets into skyscrapers)
  • In a world of nuclear weapons and of economic and technological advances and interconnection, religious extremists with a 14th Century mentality have access to 21st Century weapons and their killing scales [nowhere does Harris question these 21st Century weapons].
  • Therefore, the human race, to survive, cannot afford the luxury of any gods, faith or religion.

To Harris, it does no good to object, “But my religious beliefs regulate my own behavior, not yours, and they are all about peace and non-violence.” Harris insists that peaceful and “moderate” religionists are just as guilty as rabid fundamentalists on a bloody jihad, because peaceful and even pacifist believers, by the very act of believing in God, are providing intellectual ammunition and cover for the jihadi and the Crusader. That strikes me a bit like saying that, since my dear, departed, Slovakian grandmother was opposed to the Nazis, she is just as guilty of the fire bombing of Dresden in 1945 as were the Allied Air Forces. I don’t hold atheists like him guilty of the crimes of other atheists like Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot.

Nor is Harris impressed by all the good and virtue that religious people have shown or done over the millenia. Without religious faith, he believes, humanity might have been even more virtuous and have advanced farther and more quickly than it has. And since most people in most cultures have been religious anyway, there was almost no one else around to do anything at all, either good or bad. Finally, Harris asserts, whatever good religion and the religious may have done is vastly outweighed by the evils they have committed, such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, jihads, witch-burnings, pogroms, and child abuse and its cover-ups.

I’d like to know by what measure he might possibly make such calculations.

Which is all quite sobering, to say the least. But it didn’t prove to be as scary as I had thought. I began the book with some hesitation, wondering, in the back of my mind, if this book should contain the drop-dead indisputable evidence and arguments that will prove God a lie and the Christian faith a hoax. Instead, Harris seems to assume these things, and then builds his case against religion and the religious from there. Most of his cases involve setting up the most absurd examples and outrageous caricatures of religion, and then knocking them down, verbally or logically. After so many pages of ridicule and the worst assumptions and stereotypes, you start to wonder when and how that ever got confused for critical, logical thinking.

It would be so comforting if his salvos against church, mosque and synagogue lacked any potent ammunition. But Harris has a lot of rotten fruit lying around to lob at us precisely because the church has provided so much of it. He is spot on when he asks questions like, How is that Galileo and Copernicus were excommunicated from the Church while Hitler never was? I won’t even begin to say what projectiles the mosque or the synagogue have coming back at them because, as a Christian, I have to take responsibility for what has been done in my name, or in the name of my Lord. And there’s plenty to take responsibility for. But Harris reserves his most shrill and frightening language for Islam.

At the very least, Harris builds a very strong case for separation of church and state. I suspect that he is unaware of the number of Christians, especially Anabaptists, who are with him on that one, or who even made it possible by their martyrdom. He also builds a very strong case for humility, especially within the ranks of church leadership and structure. I also felt some sympathy for his arguments against the church imposing its faith-based morality upon the wider society. As much as we might rightly decry sexual immorality, abortion and recreational drug use, do we really, as Christians, want to do everything necessary to deny, discourage and punish these things among nonbelievers? Is our witness better served by going after people for doing these things, or by people going after us for not doing them?

Harris also makes the case for secular society not giving the church a free pass and a respectable, but hypocritical, nod anymore. As someone very concerned about the church’s witness, I would much rather deal with Harris’ kind of hostile engagement than with the disdainful but polite indifference and calculated avoidance that I so often encounter. Harris repeatedly asserts that one can only arrive at religious belief by pulling the plug on your mental faculties and running in a blind panic from any and all contrary beliefs. But I have found that some of my deepest spiritual breakthroughs and insights have come from honest debate and discussion with people of other religions, or of no religion at all.

Which is another weakness of The End of Faith. He assumes that dialog and discussion with religious people are pointless and impossible. The End of Faith is, therefore, meant not so much to convert (or de-convert) believers, but to preach to the choir and dish up heaping, steaming plates of verbal red meat for any and all who have been hurt by or angry with organized religion. I say this not to frighten us but to help us prepare for the suspicious-to-hostile missional context in which are increasingly finding ourselves. There are more of such people around than we might think, judging by how quickly the newest atheist manifestos are flying off the shelves of bookstores and enjoying unexpected additional printings. The manners and politesse by which Harris, Dawkins and others might once have given us at least a respectful space are wearing thin. I occasionally run into this emerging stridency in places such as the French language conversational groups I sometimes attend, where, at least once, other non-believers were so shocked by the way someone else was verbally abusing my faith that they came to its defense without my having to say a thing. Rather than feeling aggrieved or insulted, I was glad to be out of my customary church cocoon and in contact with such beliefs.

For beliefs these are, requiring every bit as much faith on Harris’ part as do mine. For example, Harris believes that science will soon explain all things moral and spiritual, such as conversion or virtue, by way of neurobiology or evolutionary advantage, thereby rendering God and faith obsolete. He also expects reason and evolution to give us soon a workable moral code which will be self-evidently correct, at least to everyone with a university degree. Aside from being a faith statement no less hopeful than mine, what would a brain scan of meditation or an evolutionary advantage for prayer or virtue prove except that they happened in the brain and were good for our survival? A believer in God might find that quite reassuring, not challenging.

What Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and other militant missionary atheists overlook is that they are effectively serving up another religion in place of the ones they condemn: a religion of positive scientific advance and enlightenment, with self, science and society as God. By looking for evolutionary and neuro-biological explanations for spirituality, they are also admitting that humans are incurably religious. Martin Luther even said so. And while they accuse all religions of being inherently violent, lacking any internal restraint against murder and domination (they’ve never read Mennonite theology), their own proffered religions also lack any internal restraint against violence or persecution of people who differ, whatever their faith.

But I agree with Harris and others that we have less to fear from atheists like themselves and more to fear from religions and religionists in the service of ego, power and domination. I believe it was Plato who said that there were three kinds of atheists:

  1. One who says that because there is no God, we are therefore free to discover how evil we might be. They are few and are often safely in jail, having found out just how evil they might be.
  2. One who says that because there is no God, we must be as good and virtuous as possible on our own power. Among these we find some very noble souls. Despite the drubbing he gave me, I’ll give Harris the benefit of the doubt, and place him in this category. He does work hard at finding an ethical approach to life. But when they find such efforts unworkable and unsustainable, such atheists are also in great danger—of becoming believers, as did Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis and the woman who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, and who, when I heard her story, had become a youth ministry specialist for the United Methodist Church.
  3. One who says that because there is no God, we are free to make one up for our own purposes.

This third group of atheists are the most dangerous kind, for they may actually hide behind pulpits, camouflaging themselves as believers, pastors, bishops and theologians, and thus bring disaster and disgrace upon themselves, the church and the faith that they exploit. Because they are often so adept at manipulation, disguises and demagoguery, we have much more to fear from them than from outright and openly hostile atheists like Harris and Dawkins. They are the ones who will continue to pile up the most damning evidence in Harris’ favor.

If we would take seriously our witness in the world and “be ready to offer an explanation to everyone who asks of you the reason for your hope (I Peter 3:16),” then we must be ready even for an occasional outbreak of some of the hostility and contempt that Harris serves up. But just being peacefully present and available to it will itself be something of a victory, even if we don’t have all the answers to satisfy our interrogators. No one has. And its not what is asked of us as witnesses. It may even be that, by peacefully and respectfully absorbing some of the wrath that has understandably piled up over church sex abuse scandals, and the church’s historic complicity in war, segregation and the oppression of women, without returning wrath in kind, we will have provided some venue for healing and a more effective witness than any words or arguments can provide.

In the face of criticism and hostility I take comfort from the following things:

  1. that we are being held accountable to the very standards and beliefs that we, our Bible and our Christ have advocated in the world, or which are logically inferred from our beliefs and standards;
  2. that critics are always doing us a favor, often in spite of themselves. To the extent that they are right, we have learned something helpful. To the extent that they are wrong or exaggerated, we have an opportunity to display the patient and gracious love of Christ.

Often our critics and opponents are working with an element of truth. In Harris’ case, he has taken the verbal equivalent of a baseball bat to a job better suited for a surgeon’s scalpel. That so much of his fear and hostility is in reaction to religiously-based violence makes this a very good time for a peaceful Anabaptist witness to Christ that is uncompromising in its love for friend and foe alike, to the point of being willing to die for our enemies and detractors, rather than to kill them. Such love is our most powerful witness, our most convincing argument.

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WEEK 12: NUMBERS 3-13; PSALM 12

August 26th, 2010 by mswora

In these early chapters of Numbers, we see the organization of the tribes and the priesthood taking shape, reflecting the fact that “God is not a God of chaos, but of harmony (I Cor. 14:35a).” The orderly marching of Israel, organized by tribes, behind the priests and Levites with the Ark of the Covenant, following the divine cloud by day or the pillar of fire by night, would have reinforced, in the hearts and minds of the Canaanites, the fear of the Lord that was to go before them and prepare the way for their coming.

The Apostle Paul, reflecting on the very histories we are reading, wrote: “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert. Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: “The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry.”We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did—and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died.We should not test the Lord, as some of them did—and were killed by snakes. And do not grumble, as some of them did—and were killed by the destroying angel. These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! (I Cor. 10: 1-12)

ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE, RACISM TOO?

In Numbers 13, we read that Moses has a “Cushite wife.” Beyond that, she is not named. Cush we usually associate with Ethiopia. Was his wife, Zipporah, whom we first encounter in Exodus, “Cushite?” Moses married her during his sojourn in the Desert of Midian, east of Egypt, so that’s unlikely. Or complicated. Or had Zipporah left and divorced Moses? Or died? Or had he divorced her, or even taken a second wife? That wasn’t technically illegal under Mosaic law, nor unusual for the Patriarchs, but it never went well. By the time of Jesus, both he and his fellow Jews were re-affirming the Edenic ideal of “the two become one flesh.” We don’t know the answers to these questions. But the fact that she was “Cushite” very likely Ethiopian, brought scorn from Moses’ brother and sister. And that brought a harsh response from God. If racism was the problem, all the more ironic that Miriam turned “white” with leprosy. This story may reflect two ideas that were revolutionary at the time: 1) that the Hebrews and fugitives from Egypt were a mixed lot in color and culture, down to the level of their families; and 2) God was declaring himself, in the strongest of terms, opposed to racism.

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