In the words of an author wiser and more skilled than I:
Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live!
I will sing praises to my God as long as I exist!
Do not trust in princes,
or in human beings, who cannot deliver!
Their life's breath departs, they return to the ground;
on that day their plans die.
How happy is the one whose helper is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
the one who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who remains forever faithful, vindicates the oppressed,
and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord releases the imprisoned.
The Lord gives sight to the blind.
The Lord lifts up all who are bent over.
The Lord loves the godly.
The Lord protects those residing outside their native land;
he lifts up the fatherless and the widow,
but he opposes the wicked.
The Lord rules forever,
your God, O Zion, throughout the generations to come!
Praise the Lord!
(NET, copyright 1996-2006 Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C)
(By the way, specifically what interested me when I read this tonight was that, first, that we are not to - and cannot - put our trust in human allies, and, second, the kind of people for whom God stands up. But I don't want to lose sight of the first point while thinking about the second point.)
The beginning of a (bad) "story" (more like a thesis with a plot) which will probably never be finished (but who knows?), based in what I hope is not an entirely implausible setting:
Twenty fifty, In One Possible Future
In 2050 although over two-thirds of families in the United States still use English almost exclusively at home, everyone under the age of 35 speaks Spanish as well as if it was a first language, and no one thinks nothing of that fact. The first hispanic president has come and gone, and the current president is a hispanic woman. By gaining a second language and, to a lesser extent, culture, the United States has become more internationally aware than ever. Japanese is now the most popular foreign language course, with Chinese not far behind. Due to the challenges of teaching East Asian languages (even with the advantage of students already being bilingual), language courses begin as early as middle school, or sometimes even in elementary school. (Curriculum in Spanish as a second language, of course, starts in kindergarten or preschool - for those that need it. Although the average student will still take more English courses than Spanish courses, courses in Spanish are common throughout elementary, middle, junior high, and high school.) Arabic courses, while less popular, are pushed heavily still by the federal government despite the waning significance of the Middle East - and since schools are now funded with a centralized pool nationally, it is easy for the federal government to ensure funding is available for an Arabic department at all junior high and high schools. Unfortunately, due to the difficulties of learning Arabic, few students ever develop any real ability, and the government's emphasis on Arabic has been almost counter-productive.
The United States' growing sense of internationalism is useful since while the United States is no longer unchallenged as earth's only superpower, though still the oldest and most important, and soon to be eclipsed by China, Europe, and Japan - and maybe even India, and it needs a savvy approach to international affairs. Now Mexico is invoked in the same sentence with Canada and the United Kingdom as a critical, and assumed, ally. Japan can sometimes be counted on, but their power is still primarily economic, not military, and they are not as close an ally as the United States might wish. The situation in East Asia - balancing the needs and wants of China, Japan, and Korea, while maintaining good relations with all of them - is delicate, preventing too close an alliance with any of the East Asian powers. Because of the introduction of cheap alternative power sources and its drastically reduced oil production (which otherwise might still be of relevance to developing countries), the Middle East no longer holds the economic significance it once did, though culturally and ideologically it still has a heightened role.
How long has the situation in Darfur been going on? I'd lost track, and had to go check: two and a half years. Of course, I don't remember it as often as I should, though I haven't entirely forgotten. The most recent reminder was Gary Farber wrote a post about it yesterday, rounding up some recent stories about it. Farber points out that as far as sending any forces to the area, basically nothing is going on. I understand the US not sending anyone (though our leadership seems interested in backing NATO forces if they were to be sent), but where is everyone else? So far, only the African Union has shown up, with the help of outside money and transportation, but everyone seems to think that that is not an adequate force.
I just want it clear that I think that supporting this kind of use of armed forces is not the same as supporting wars in general. This wouldn't be war - or shouldn't be, anyway. Having said that, whoever ends up in charge of such a force definitely needs to be careful that it doesn't end up as a war after all.
Brad Abare of Church Marketing Sucks (which contrary to what the name might imply is not against church marketing by any means) says in a recent post,
How much should I do? What should I avoid? What is cool? What works?
Here's a simple approach I've learned...
If the electricity went out, and your walls fell down, and your biggest givers died, what would you have left? Would you have a community of people still seeking after the heart of God? Would you still worship even without a band? Would you still be able to learn about God even though you can't show a video or a PowerPoint slide? In other words, what you have when everything else goes away is what your church is really all about.
Sadly, this seems to be exactly the question most churches never ask these days.
I don't always agree with the Church Marketing Sucks guys (not being a fan of "marketing" in general, even their more nuanced understanding), but I think this time they nail it exactly.
Advice: Read David Neiwart's blog regularly. Neiwert is a journalist who blogs primarily about racism, violent rightist movements, and things of that nature - and orcas. Neiwert is a pretty informed and savvy writer (his commenting readers do not always live up to those standards, unfortunately).
I was thinking about Neiwert tonight because I wanted to write here about some disturbing ideological movements passing themselves off as Christian. I want to work on that a little longer, though. In the meantime, Neiwert has lots of useful information worth keeping an eye on.
Jordon Cooper points to a fascinating and useful article ("Million-dollar Murray") by Malcom Gladwell in The New Yorker about power-law social problems, such as homelessness and car emissions. A power-law problem is one where contributions to the problem follow a power-law distribution (instead of say, a normal distribution, which, as Gladwell points out, seems to be what we usually expect). So, for example, Gladwell points to the finding that a small fraction of Los Angeles police officers were responsible for much of the problems with police abuse. In the case of homelessness, there is a similar problem, where a handful of chronically homeless people cost an inordinate amount to the system as a whole, and with auto emissions, a small fraction of cars are responsible for much or most of automobile pollution.
This article points to a lot of things I've realized in the last few years but don't get talked about very much and that I hadn't really thought of how to articulate. One of the things that comes out is that it is sometimes worth it to fix some problems, even if people don't "deserve" to have the problem fixed - such as some of the worst chronic homeless, in whose case it would be cheaper to just give them an apartment and such than to have to pay their medical bills everytime they end up in the hospital (a solution I thought of a long time ago in reference to specific homeless persons, but I never thought anyone would buy it at a political level - although apparently some people have already tried it!). The problem of course, as Gladwell points out, is that this violates our sense of fairness, along with some practical problems (one has an incentive, say, to be worse, not better). Gladwell says, "Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both." Gladwell is more optimistic, as we might be, when writing about the problem of automobile emissions, where he can point to a practical and efficient approach to helping solve the problem. This suggests that not all "power-law solutions," as Gladwell calls them, are really as similar as he would lead us to believe. But, some, such as the proposed solution to the homelessness problem are classic examples of unfairness (in a positive sense - giving people what they don't deserve), but unfairness that we might want engage in for the benefit of everyone. It occurs to me that by lumping all of this together Gladwell may have mixed together two separate issues: That it might to help to check if problems fit power-law distributions, and that the solutions to some social issues are "unfair." But, whether these are separate issues or the same thing, they are both useful observations that we need to think about when approaching social problems.
(A rather sketchy post, I admit, but I wanted to get this down while I was thinking about it.)
I stopped in at Christian Challenge's weekly meeting tonight. Toby Havens was talking about the humanity of Christ, and in the process pointed out that Jesus was known to occasionally display emotion, including anger. How that is all related to Jesus' divinity is actually irrelevant to my present point, because bringing up Jesus being angry made me think about something much more concrete: I remembered what made Jesus angry. Now, that's not too hard for me to remember because it makes me angry too, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
So what made Jesus angry? Well, I suppose it depends on how you read certain passages whether Jesus was angry, but there's a very clear instance that almost no one would question: driving the money changers and the vendors out of the Temple. Angry - he was downright violent. And his disciples, the Gospel of John reports, remember that it is written, "Zeal for your house will consume me."
Well, anyway, this got me to thinking some more. What other things could I think of that Jesus appeared worked up over. Well, one obvious one is the religious leadership. The "Seven Woes" passage of Matthew 23, where Jesus goes through a list of things the teachers of the law and the Pharisees do wrong. There are several other passages in a similar vein. Luke 11, for example, also contains many condemnations by Jesus of the Pharisees and the the teachers of the law.
There is a distinct pattern here: hypocrites and those using religion for temporal gain are consistently, and vehemently, condemned. The only other people he calls down "woe" onto are those who lead others in to sin (e.g. Matthew 18:6), the rich (Luke 6), and cities that do not repent (e.g. Matthew 11:21) - and two of those three acategories re closely related to the ones already mentioned. And there are numerous passages where Jesus gives stern warnings about not believing him. But the most specific condemnation of any sinners other than the religious leaders for any sin other than for not accepting his mission and message are at the city level - and still it is related to not listening to Jesus. Whenever Jesus yells about sin he takes on the sin directly. Only competing teachers are directly condemned.
What is equally interesting is what Jesus does not yell about. He rarely gets loud about sin - which is not to say he does not say a lot of negative things about sin, quite the contrary, but it does say something about how he addresses sin rhetorically. First, the occasions where he is loud about it: As we have already seen, he addresses the issue of leading others into sin and hypocrisy very strongly. He is very harsh about sin as as an activity in and of itself (say, for example, Matthew 5:29-30), but even that is usually in the middle of a section of moral teaching. He also brings up the penalties for sin - in a very general meaning - in parables. He has strong words in some of his ethical sermons about specific sins, for example, his condemnation of hate as murder in Matthew 5:21-22. But notice how he addresses sin in the lif of individuals. Look at how he talks to the Samaritan woman in John 4, or Zaccheus. He doesn't beat people over the head with their sins as individuals, or even, usually as categories of people. He doesn't say "Woe, adulterers!" though he does condemn immorality - but that's a different way of saying it. And it's in marked contrast to when he condemns the Pharisees as a group. Which wasn't to say every Pharisee was a sinner, we know Jesus had followers from the Pharisees, such as Joseph of Arimathea, but as a group he had something to say about them.
Other things Jesus is almost completely silent on. He never condemns the Romans - whom just about everyone expects him to take on, whether physically or spiritually. Jesus is not like the Zealots, and he seems to be careful about making that point.
So why yell at the Pharisees and physically chase profiteers, but be almost silent about adulterers and even tax collectors and tyrants? I think that must be a delicate question to answer. I mean, I think the condemnation of the religious leaders is easy to handle. And even the Temple sellers makes sense, at least to me (though the message has clearly been lost on many). But we might be more comfortable if he did say, "Pilate, shape up you tyrant!" But he chose not to - I suspect because Jesus really wanted to focus on Israel, and also because he did not want to get mired down in politics. Perhaps he did have strong feelings about the Romans, but he at the very least kept quiet about it (though he may not indeed have been worried about them). (It does occur to me, though, that indeed John the Baptist, not Jesus, criticized Herod, and for adultery, not even oppression.) His approach to "small-timers" is probably the most interesting, though. I think part of this is sensitivity. The outsideres - such as prostitutes and tax collectors, but also the disabled and the Samaritans - needed more gentle treatment. The confident hypocrites needed shaking up. All of them needed a message, but they needed to hear different things about that message to understand it. Anyway, that is my working theory.
It is hard to say how far we could go with these examples. Certainly others, such as John, Paul, the other writers of the New Testament, and the prophets, addressed different things different ways (though I think I would argue Paul's approach is eerily similar, while not identical, to Jesus'). But I think also that, specifically in the United States, there are definitely some similarities today to Jesus' place and time. And I think that we too might do better to go after Zondervan and Christian record labels and hypocrititcal religious leaders, and hypocritical sermonizing politicians than "sodomites" or secular humanists or "liberals." We need to address all those groups - but in appropriate ways. Preach reform to those who need to reform, and the good news to those who need to hear that.
I am saddened that the more vocal religious leadership seems to so closely resemble that of two millenia ago. But I think that we too can't be too confident. One of the passages I cited when talking about what Jesus' condemned was Luke 6; specifically I was thinking of Luke 6:24-26:
“But woe to you who are rich!
For you have received your consolation.
Woe to you, you who are full now!
For you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now!
For you will mourn and weep.
Woe, when men speak well of you!
For their fathers did the same thing to the false prophets.
(WEB)
The prophets always go after the arrogant. Let us be humble, but courageous.
