Sexism is Unbiblical

Last week, gender in the Church became a big issue.

Rather, I should say that gender in the Church – which is always a big issue – became more difficult for men to ignore. It’s always easier to just let it fester, either dismissing Christianity as inherently sexist or ignoring the toxic effects of unbiblical (and also evil) exclusion of most people from the full flowering of their talents and abilities.

Kathy Escobar – who is one of my favorite (co)pastors ever – wrote a great blog post about how “well-behaved women won’t change the Church” and hosted Unladylike author Pam Hogewide at her really excellent church (located in an old Grange hall outside of Denver). On a lighter note, a friend reposted the christian feminist blog’s “top 10 reasons men shouldn’t be ordained.”

Most seriously the Catholics are having a major dust-up over “serious doctrinal problems” in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, whose members represent more than 80% of US organizations for women religious (a term that I can’t find neatly defined anywhere except that it lacks the solemn vows of a nun). The church hierarchy is framing this conflict as a simple matter of church discipline, but nonetheless a few powerful men (in their roles from which women are systematically excluded) will be basically rearranging the bylaws, programs, teachings and affiliations of a women’s organization. That’s sexism, clear as day.

I am not a Catholic – and certainly not a Catholic woman religious – so I do not presume tell the LCWR how to respond to this encroachment. Nor do I wish to to declare whether the LCWR has doctrinal problems (after all, the Catholic church has blatantly sexist doctrines so free women are a problem in that context). But I see the incident as an opportunity to reflect on sexism in the Church – its origins and its conflict with scripture.

The sexism that is so deeply rooted in Christian culture is generally rooted in teachings like this one:

Women should be silent during the church meetings. It is not proper for them to speak. They should be submissive, just as the law says. If they have any questions, they should ask their husbands at home, for it is improper for women to speak in church meetings.

This is warmed-over first-century sexism, which has unfortunately been enshrined as the “word of God” (in the white-bearded old white man sense). This is an extreme case, and it was an overreaction even back when the words were written – apparently to help the church in Corinth deal with a situation where the women were getting uppity. I’m not aware of anyone who literally follows it these days.

Still, it is there in the Bible with “love thy neighbor.” And although many protestant denominations now accept women in their highest positions, the clergy is generally a man’s world and the Church tends to focus on sexual and reproductive morality (which is more limiting to women) rather than economic morality (which is more limiting to men – at least until we work out some of the income disparity issues). Repentance for this sin is urgent and essential. And to help us repent we must remember that it has not always been this way. 

We are caught in a myth of linear improvement, in which we believe that women (and other oppressed groups) are better off now than they ever have been. But even taking the biblical narrative as fact we can see this is not so.

In my favorite pre-Jesus story, there is a passing reference to gender roles that is all the more remarkable for how quietly it slips by. It’s easy to miss, embedded in a chapter that lists who worked with whom rebuilding which section of Jerusalem’s wall.

Rephaiah son of Hur, the leader of half the district of Jerusalem, was next to them on the wall…Shallum son of Hallohesh and his daughters repaired the next section. He was the leader of the other half of the district of Jerusalem. (Neh. 3:9, 12)

It is odd that the city seems to have been divided, but this points to normalcy of  women and men toiling shoulder to shoulder. While one half-mayor seems to have been working alone or as part of broader team, the other was toiling with his daughters! Women! 2,600 years ago! This matter-of-fact statement indicates that there was nothing terribly unusual about a community leader doing manual labor with women or girls. It wasn’t that they were making sandwiches for him – they were their father’s partners on their family’s section of the wall.

So let’s look at why no explanation was needed for the presence of women doing dangerous physical work (in which the “common laborers worked with one hand supporting their load and one hand holding a weapon.” – see Neh. 4:17). This was apparently not the only spot on the wall where women were working. We can find sections where “people” from Jericho (v.2), Tekoa (v.5 & 27), Zanoah (v.13).

Presumably if the presence of Shallum’s daughters was scandalous or extraordinary they would not have been mentioned or there would have been some sort of editorial comment. And of course we must wonder why someone with such odd judgement as to let his daughters run wild doing manual labor would have been in a position of community leadership.

It seems that the story of Nehemiah represents one of the periods in history when the pendulum of liberty swung toward more equality and freedom. Even though this was a very dangerous time – or perhaps because it was a very dangerous time, there seems to have been an “all hands on deck” attitude in the community. Gender roles broke down as part of a general revival; people acted in accordance with God’s will for us to act cooperatively as equals.

They would have had ample support from the holy texts.

We all know the creation story: God made Eve out of Adam’s rib after first offering all the other animals as “companions.” relegating women to secondary status (notwithstanding jokes about men being a beta test). But really, that’s only the second creation story. The first creation story is much more egalitarian:

 Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

 Sexism was part of the Fall. The gender roles we take for granted are not natural and not God’s ultimate desire for us. We should not cling to them. The Bible does usually model a male-supremacist society, but that is the result of a patriarchal society choosing what to record and what to ignore. Even so, some remarkable stories of Women in Charge have made it through the editorial process.Most remarkable of these leaders was Deborah.

Before Israel had kings (a government that was contrary to God’s will and intimately connected to patriarchy), there were judges – non-hereditary guides who did not apparently accumulate wealth or institutionalize power. The first three judges were unremarkable – jammed into a single chapter that mainly tells about who they killed rather than their leadership abilities or wisdom.

However, the fourth of these judges was a woman, and it seems that she was one of the best of the bunch. Unlike any other judge, her story was told twice – repeated in a song with Barak, who was an interesting character who emphasized the breakdown of usual gender roles: He was Deborah’s military commander but did not receive honor because he wouldn’t go into battle without her. Instead, the enemy Sisera was killed by another woman, Jael, who lulled him with sweet hospitality and then drove a tent spike through his head. Not very ladylike, that Jael.

Under Deborah’s leadership, there was forty years of peace. So she obviously did a bang-up job. Nevertheless, the guys never again recognized the leadership of women and most people today are unaware of Deborah, who “arose as a mother for Israel.” (Judges 5:7) Or at least they fail to see the implication that God does clearly put women in positions of leading men sometimes, with good results.

Despite the old boys club’s best efforts to marginalize women after Deborah made them look bad, something like feminism made a comeback during the resolution of a generations-long crisis that (masculine) top-down approaches failed to resolve. The restoration of Jerusalem depended (among other things) upon leaders who could admit that women bring much value to the table.

So here we are again. The 20th century was a period of great progress for gender equality, but the last decade has been decidedly mixed. The menfolk are perhaps feeling threatened, and pushing back hard. Progress continues on many fronts, but we still have incidents like the forced “reform” of the LWCR.

This parallels almost exactly the pushback that followed Jesus’ profoundly respectful treatment of women, and his choice to reveal his deeper mysteries to them. It seems that we are once again in a situation where men feel threatened by the inspiration of women, and are responding the best way they (we) know how – by grasping for control and attempting to silence feminine voices.

We face a crisis at least as serious as that faced by the daughters of Shallum as they built Jerusalem’s wall with their father. Then, as now, we cannot afford to refuse women’s contributions.

If the men running the Catholic Church want to silence women, that’s their prerogative. We can only hope and pray that their desire for control won’t do too much damage to the rest of the world’s prospects for building something new, better and more aligned with God’s hopes for us.

Democrats, Republicans and the Kingdom of God

Sometimes a clock radio set to the news can yield weird results. For example, a few days ago I woke up to an interviewee re-framing one of Jesus’ parables – the story of the vineyard workers:

The vineyard owner’s choice to pay workers the same wage regardless of whether they started in the morning or afternoon is usually taken as an illustration that we can just get saved right before death and be just as saved as a lifelong Christian. But through my half-asleep fog some fella was arguing that this parable actually shows that God doesn’t like unions because the workers and owner were contracting directly. See? No union in Jesus’ story! God must not like unions!

It was an odd first thought of the day.

I was not so sure about the speaker’s conclusion, but I thought that he was onto something. Was Jesus’ economic-themed parable actually a story about economics, notwithstanding the dominant interpretation? I was only semiconscious, but the comment stuck with me.

So I finally looked up the article online. It was a muddled and overly-ambtious exploration of numerous issues, which all swirled around a false choice between two supposedly opposite positions offered by the Republicans and Democrats.

The article began by framing Jesus’ views on the US economy as “a matter of fierce debate among Christians – with conservatives promoting a small-government Jesus and liberals seeing Jesus as an advocate for the poor.” In fact, these are not at all contradictory statements; they are like debating whether sugar is sweet OR fire is hot. Both are true, and both fall short of Jesus-approved economic policy. Personally, I think the Republicans are less wrong on this one, and don’t see any case for legislating morality. But that’s another story, which I explored in Holy Cooperation! a few years back.

The mystery speaker was David Barton, whose organization “WallBuilders” is a reference to the story of the namesake of this blog! A theological cousin! His “about” page says this:

In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and thus restore stability, safety, and a promising future to that great city. We have chosen this historical concept of “rebuilding the walls” to represent allegorically the call for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation’s foundations.

Sounds good to me, although a brief perusal of the articles on the website confirms my initial suspicion that Barton and I have differing perspectives on the whys and hows of the rebuilding.

Even so, I appreciate his unusual take on a familiar story. Looking closely, I found the scripture to be transformative. And I’ll admit that there’s more to this story than economics (as much as I would like to leave it there).

The most important aspect of this story is its context. Here we have a great example of how the arbitrary chapter numbers used in the Bible can impede understanding; this passage appears as part of Matthew 19:16 – 20:16. We can tell those verses form a coherent passage because they are bracketed on both sides by Jesus’ clearly going from one place to another. In contrast, the chapter break obviously splits the story. The first verse of chapter 20, where people often start reading, begins with the second half of a thought: “For the Kingdom of Heaven…”

So what’s the first half of the thought? It’s the tale of the rich young man, which is ironically one of those more Democrat-friendly stories. This is the one where he delivers his famous line, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”

But then Jesus almost immediately launches into a parable in which the Kingdom is likened to just the sort of rich (presumably Republican) person to whom he just barred the door. What’s up with that?

I think the key is in the transition. After hearing Jesus ask the rich man to hand over his wealth, Peter assumes that there is some sort of cover charge to heaven and inquires about whether there might be a VIP room. “We’ve given up everything to follow you,” he asks. “What will we get out of it?”

Jesus reassures Peter that he’ll get a good seat, but then apparently takes him down a notch, saying “But many who seem to be important now will be the least important then, and those who are considered least here will be the greatest then.”

What struck me was that in this transition Jesus did not use the usual language for Kingdom, although my translation (NLT) swaps in that word. Instead, Jesus speaks of the “regeneration” (palingenesias), which only appears one other time in the entire Bible.

I’m  not usually a big translation geek, but the rarity of this term intrigued me. So I looked up the other case, in the book of Titus,which describes how believers will be washed by the regeneration. Washed of what? Well, prior to that, “Our lives were full of evil and envy. We hated others and they hated us.”

So regeneration, in addition to being a mystical reference to the world’s return to an Eden-like state, is about letting go of the envy and competitiveness being shown both by the young rich man and especially by Peter (who eventually won the big competition among the apostles and is regarded as the first pope, oddly enough).

Having straightened out all that, let’s look at the parable that Jesus uses to explain why he just disappointed the rich man.

Jesus is comparing the Kingdom to the owner of the estate, and not saying that the Kingdom has an owner of the estate. That is an essential difference, for it determines whether we are talking about the Kingdom being a benevolent boss or simply involving a benevolent boss.

I don’t think Barton is claiming that heaven will literally include idle poor waiting for work and wealthy landowners unilaterally setting wages – after all, Jesus just said that it is “very hard” for the wealthy to get in, let alone take over the joint.

Still, Barton seems to be holding up the absence of unions as an ideal, despite our living in a world where bosses generally don’t risk alienating their hardest workers by giving a full day’s wage to even those who start work just before quitting time. This is a rather bizarre selective analogy, used to make the strange assertion that because one illustration of the Kingdom (out of many) of Heaven doesn’t include collective bargaining, we should take that to mean that unions are not desirable here in the pre-regeneration world.

If Barton is going to argue for a lack of unions, he should also take into account that this parable does not feature a human in the boss-like role. So should we take action here to avoid having owner/managers and just let God run all the businesses? That would be sort of like worker collectives, but I doubt that’s where Barton is going.

Regardless, anyone who is looking forward to a heaven in which he or she gets to “do what I want with my money” is likely to be disappointed to discover we are all just workers together in a big collective where everyone gets the same wage regardless of our contribution.

The good news is that all our needs will be met. Everyone will get a fair day’s wage at the proper time. But those who expect special treatment for being hard workers or early adopters will be disappointed. If we believe Jesus’ parable, the whole corrupt transactional nature of our world will be regenerated to something like the abundance found in the Garden of Eden.

And there sure won’t be special seating for Democratic or Republican fundraisers.

Perversion Everywhere!!!

Our great nation is deeply perverted. Perversion surrounds us.

Now, those who know me are probably wondering, “Perversion? What happened to Andrew? How did some Puritan wingnut get control of the blog?”

But wait, let’s make sure we are all on the same page here: According to dictionary.com, the origin of “perversion” is “action of turning aside from truth, corruption, distortion” (originally of religious beliefs). With that in mind, the common usage of the word “pervert” in a usually sexual context is deeply ironic: The whole fixation on so-called sexual perversion is itself a perversion, in that it uses scripture in a way that is much different than it was intended.

This is quite a claim. But I can back it up with three simple pairs of passages. First, let’s take another look at Sodom.

Yes, there were sexual misdeeds described in the tale of the destruction of Sodom (for the record, those were attempted rape and not consensual sex between men, which does not appear in the story at all). But after centuries of perverted teachings, most people just unquestioningly assume that these misdeeds (and imaginary consensual sex acts) were the reason for the city’s destruction.  This is a fallacy of believing that after the fact means because of the fact.

But, some may say, doesn’t it seem like the city’s destruction immediately after this offense suggests it had something to do with it?

Perhaps, but nowhere in the Bible does God say that sex was the cause. In fact, God specifically says something different through the prophet Ezekiel. Specifically, “Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door. She was proud and committed detestable sins, so I wiped her out, as you have seen.”

Considering all the rioting and unrest that has recently been wrought by current economic injustice, a city burning to the ground for this reason makes much more sense than because a city had too many boys who liked boys.

Not convinced? Here’s another pair of passages from another key story:

The book of Nehemiah describes the rebuilding of Jerusalem, which is a pivotal moment in the biblical narrative in that it ends the Babylonian Exile, which was one of the darkest eras of Jewish history. If we project our own fixation on sex upon this story, we would assume that it would at least briefly address the sexual deviance that must have caused God to withdraw protection and blessing. After all, that’s God’s pet issue, right?

The trouble is that sex had nothing to do with it.

Midway through rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, the effort runs into trouble, and it isn’t because folks are sneaking off from work shifts to fool around. As I’ve described in detail, the rebuilding stalled because the people were struggling with debt. So Nehemiah demands debt forgiveness and declines to take the perks of his position.

The only time that sex comes up at all is at the end of the book, when Nehemiah puts an end to intermarriage as an afterthought to confronting a series of economic problems. But even here, the problem is more related to protecting the community’s identity than any sort of sexual restriction. And in any case he doesn’t dwell upon it and moves along to conclude his writing with a mention of how he made sure there was enough wood and grain for sacrifices. Ho hum.

Finally, consider Jesus’ response when confronted with economic sin and sexual sin:

As I recently mentioned, the only recorded case when Jesus freaked out at people is when he cleared out the commercial sinners who had defiled the temple, whipping them with ropes and knocking over their tables.

On the other hand, when confronted with the sexual sin of a woman caught in adultery, Jesus responded in a way that drove off the accusers!

I have to say it looks like there’s a consistent pattern of economics being more important than sex. But you’d never know this from watching Christians.

It never ceases to amaze me that young people are encouraged to make promises to avoid sex while much greater temptations and dangers lie everywhere in the economic realm. Sex is portrayed as an existential threat while little or no effort is made to warn young people about the evils of credit card debt, exploitative mortgage practices and abusive workplaces.

And somehow it’s a major political issue that the “sanctity of marriage” must be protected. Republican presidential candidates are pressured to sign the “Family Leader” declaration of “dependence upon marriage” that throws in everything but the kitchen sink (and economic justice). Meanwhile they ignore the economic changes that put greater and greater strain upon those marriages they pretend to protect.

These perverts could not miss the point more completely. Our day’s biggest challenge is not to refrain from certain physical expressions of love (or even simple lust). Instead, we must actively seek a new way of being in community with each other, so that we may all live in peace and plenty.

I know this is challenging stuff. We have all been trained from birth to associate morality with sexual restraint. It’s hard for me, even, despite a relatively secular upbringing.

There’s nothing wrong with sexual restraint, and it is a valuable thing to cultivate. I’ll admit that I have work to do in that department. Even the Family Leader statement makes some good points about the benefits of a stable home life for children. But we all need to repent from this perversion of obsessing about sex, and turn back to God, who tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Learning to Share

A few weeks ago, I attended a weekend-long conference hosted by the National Havurah Committee. A havurah, by the way, is a lay-led Jewish congregation (usually egalitarian and sometimes with collective leadership) like Tikkun Leil Shabbat, which I’ve been attending semi-regularly for the last year.

The conference was called “Shall the Rich Pay More?” and it was a fascinating event, and not just because I was the token (semi-undercover) gentile or that it was my first prolonged visit to a strictly kosher environment. It featured a series of excellent workshops (including one by the love of my life, Miriam, who is my primary reason for getting mixed up with this wonderful crowd). But as good as the individual workshops were, the conversations seemed to form a larger Conversation on sharing, which has resulted in a bit of a conceptual breakthrough that I’m still digesting.

This all has resulted in one of my biggest blog struggles to date. I just can’t quite figure out how these insights are supposed to fit together. It’s like several big thoughts all tried to come out the little thought hole at the same time and got stuck.

Since I’ve tried for weeks to catch the Grand Unification Theory of Sharing, I guess it is time to just admit that I can’t do this alone. So I’m going to present a few ideas as a conversation starter.

I went into this retreat with the assumption that yes, of course the rich should pay more despite the root scripture that was the reference point of the conference title – a passage from the Book of Exodus calling for “a system of census and taxation, including that ‘the rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less’ than a half-shekel.” It seems hopelessly regressive to expect the rich and poor to pay the same tax (not even the same tax rate, which would be regressive enough). However, there is something deeper going on - as usual - which will require a broad paradigm shift of how we address money, giving, labor and everything else.

Once upon a time valuable things were held in common, or if you prefer they were held by God with human stewardship of their parts – perhaps an individual might speak of “their” bow and arrows. But gradually our customs shifted and now it is a given that people own things and have some sort of right to more than they can carry or even possibly hope to use. This is true even when their means of “earning” those things are based in trickery, exploitation and outright theft. Consider the absentee owners of a banana plantation in, say, the Philippines. They never visit and certainly never work there; they may not even be consciously aware of that piece of land buried in their portfolio. Their entire claim may rest on a corrupt government’s arbitrary decision to remove the native population and award the land to a corporate supporter of their regime. But we have no qualms about paying them money so that they can profit from “their” bananas. This is only the most extreme example of the capitalist norm in which all property claims ultimately trace back to war spoils. And yes, this  includes the time that the Israelites first invaded the promised land, sparking a prolonged bloodbath described in the Book of Joshua.

But it goes deeper than that, as I realized during a workshop on charitable giving. Wealthy people are generally thought to have a higher duty to give, to the point that poor people are often not expected to donate or even volunteer (although many do). This has led to (or at least accompanied) the individualization of giving. Rather than giving because it is part of our collective duty to support the community, we give because it is the individual duty of the “fortunate” to share with the “less fortunate.” What’s more, we often give transactionally. Whether it is a goat given on behalf of our brother, a mug from public radio or a dear aunt’s name on the new hospital wing, we increasingly want get something for our supposed charity. And while there is obvious generosity at play, these acts reinforce the transactional nature of everything. 

Where giving was once based on relationships and sometimes through collective efforts like the United Way, now there are countless ways to fine tune one’s giving, to find the charity that is just exactly the right match for our personal sense of what needs to be done in the world.

This raises a couple of concerns. First, people become desensitized to all stimuli, which suggests that an ever-higher percentage of giving will need to go to rewards. And more than that, giving by the fortunate hoards the warm fuzzy feeling of giving, and concentrates both responsibility and honor in fewer and fewer hands.

Another workshop featured the concern that young Jews are less-inclined to give to the Jewish Federations, a sort of equivalent to the United Way. Withholding giving helps prevent people from supporting causes that they regard to be unjust – for example, the “Birthright”  trips that give Jews the chance to visit Israel (in a controlled and somewhat propagandistic way) free of charge. It’s worth noting that the Hebrew word for charitable giving is tzedakah, which translates to English as “justice.” So it is certainly fair to have qualms about one’s justice giving going to what one views as unjust activities.

But by withholding tzedakah from the federations, something greater may be lost, which is the whole community’s ability to collectively make sure that everything is taken care of. That process may be flawed. We may not like the choices made. There may be inefficiencies and even corruption. But at least there is someone trying to make sure that everything is taken care of, regardless of whether it is sexy or has a good marketing campaign. Certainly the Jewish Federations could have a more inclusive process for deciding what needs to be done, but nonetheless they do decide and keep the collective act of tzedakah in motion.

But my really big realization for the weekend was around a different issue of hoarding and scarcity, which ties into much resistance to both redistribution (or prevention of wealth accumulation) as well as giving to those who are seen as undeserving because they don’t want to work. This is the part that blew my mind and had me looking like I was playing devil’s advocate when I really wasn’t.

Here it is: Many people work too much. And I don’t mean that in the obvious way. Not only is overwork burning us out and eroding our bonds with family, friends, congregation and community, but overwork is a greedy response to a world in which meaningful paid work is already scarce. And we need to scale back our economy to fit within ecological constraints. Just as some people consume too much oil or freeload on charity, a growing number of us are working more than we deserve to work. Roughly 1/3 of Americans are not part of the workforce, and the government pursues policies to keep the unemployment rate from getting below its “natural” level of 5 percent, so how dare we complain about freeloaders? Someone has to be unemployed! Our capitalist economy depends on it! If we were really concerned about freeloaders we would refuse to work more than 30 paid hours a week so that those freeloaders might find something to do!

So there you have it folks: We need to redistribute it all: wealth, income, giving, work. Then perhaps inequality will become a temporary feature based on individual choices and not a generational inheritance. In such a case it won’t be bad for everyone to pay a half-shekel, since that giving will honor everyone’s ability and duty to contribute to the community, and nobody will go hungry from the loss of their half-shekel. Otherwise we’ll stay stuck in this vicious cycle of inequality.

It’s hard to imagine a solution to this problem until we realize that probably we couldn’t be more dysfunctional. Any solution is unlikely to worsen the injustice. Consider the huge array of unproductive jobs (marketing, finance and perhaps even corrections and warfare) that are paid more than producers: farmers, factory workers and perhaps teachers. “Customer service” is about as close as most of us ever come to physically making something. How many people do you know whose day of work results in a set number of durable physical objects that are directly useful to other people?

The detachment between real productivity and pay has gotten to the point that there seems to be an inverse relationship between value and wealth. Why else would a sports star make more than the staff of an entire public school or a small town full of farmers? How else did Mitt Romney (and many others) get wealthy sacrificing jobs on the altar of “efficiency?” Once we admit that nobody is being paid what they are worth (except sometimes by chance), that frees us up to get more creative, doesn’t it?

So rather than finding a way to lessen the tax burden of those with less, we should move to restore the imbalance that  impedes the flow of wealth/energy/nourishment throughout the entire collective body. The classic example would be the Hebrew Jubilee year, in which all property returned to its original inhabitants every 50 years – a nice Commandment that was apparently never implemented. It seems like it is time to give it a try.

ANNOUNCEMENT: This blog is now being cross-posted every other week at www.theoccupychurch.org. There are a lot of interesting thoughts over there, and I encourage everyone to check it out.

A Political Fast

Today I attended the Ash Wednesday Witness of Repentance at the White House.

This service called:

for repentance and conversion of ourselves, our society and our churches to the Gospel way of justice, nonviolence and a reverence for all life and creation. We call for an immediate end to U.S. warmaking in Afghanistan; that the U.S. halt all Drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere; and that Israel and the U.S. cease it military threats against Iran. We call for reparations to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; for total disarmament and the abolition of all nuclear and conventional weapons; an end to the U.S.-supported Israeli occupation of the West Bank; an end to torture and the closing of Guantanamo and Bagram U.S. military prisons and other military torture training centers like the SOA/WHINSEC; and an end to AFRICOM and the militarization of Africa. We call, too, for the repeal of the National Defense Authorization Act 2012 which allocates $662 billion for the Pentagon and codified into law indefinite detention for suspected terrorists and their supporters, both foreign and domestic. And we call for an end to corporate domination, justice for the poor and all immigrants, and for the conversion of our war-based economy to one centered on serving the common good, alleviating poverty, and protecting the environment.

Amen. Quite a laundry list, no? The service was powerful and very, very uncomfortable. My discomfort came from two places:

First, it was an unpleasant reminder of the great wrongs done in the name of a nation that is supposedly a beacon for justice and freedom. Specifically, our location in front of that building was a reminder that this evil continues to emanate outward from it despite having nice, liberal “folks” like the Obamas living there these days. It’s such a nice-looking building (despite the sharpshooters on top), and one that I can see while crossing the street in front of my home (about a mile away); it’s hard to imagine what really goes on there at the nerve center of a violent global empire that is so paranoid that it sometimes takes three (3!) identical Marine One helicopters to get Obama back from the airport (one decoy isn’t always enough – I have seen this with my own eyes).

Second, despite the power and usefulness of this vigil’s painful reminder, I couldn’t help but be discouraged by how it seemed to miss the point. It called for repentance from a great many awful symptoms of evil, but didn’t seem to approach the cause of that evil – that war is incredibly profitable for a lot of well-connected people, just as our collective poor health is profitable to other well-connected people. (And probably there is some overlap, since what better way to encourage poor health than through war?)

Anyone who thinks that electoral politics is going to change this dynamic is naive – we already elected a supposed progressive and look where it got us. We will never be offered a serious major-party candidate who is able to make any significant changes to the underlying power structure.

If it wasn’t already, this has been made abundantly clear through the rise of “super-PACs” that are highly influenced a single ultra-wealthy person (or couple) – five of whom have provided 1/4 of all money flowing through this thoroughly corrupt system –  and have now eclipsed the power of the campaigns themselves. Obama made polite noises about eschewing this tool, but has more recently decided that the means justify the ends, even if those means further neutralize him as a serious voice for real change.

Until we can decouple profit from power, we’re going to get nowhere. Since Lent is about Jesus as well as repentance, I think it’s a good time to depart from my usual Old Testament focus, and issue a reminder that John the Baptist offered a very clear and specific set of instructions for repentance.

“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.

John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”

“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.

Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”

He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” (Luke 3:10-14)

And that is it. That is all.

Look it up if you don’t believe me. There’s nothing about war or brutality (although as today that part of the world faced plenty in the face of that era’s empire). There’s nothing about petitioning government. There’s certainly nothing about contraception.

There are two simple instructions: Share your surplus and don’t abuse your power.

So chew on that this Lenten season. As we head into another election season there will be a hysterical wave of propaganda that we should choose the lesser of evils, but remember that ALL of the major options are part of the evil system.

It’s high time we heed the lesson of Ezra, and begin to detach ourselves from our enslavement to the idea that asking the government for help will in any way solve the problems that really matter. One of the key lessons from this blog’s namesake is that community organizing got the goods where many years of begging government failed. The people struggled with a succession of kings for literally generations, and it was only when they finally turned their back on imperial power that they were able to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem in 51 days.

So here’s an idea: Use Lent to fast from election news. This may not be appropriate if you are a Republican in a state with a primary coming up. But otherwise, the torturous ongoing struggle among a bunch rich men who are powerful corporate pawns really doesn’t matter. Your attention would be better devoted to the people around you.

The election will still be there when you break your fast. Perhaps you’ll see it with new eyes.

Meet Our New King

It’s been a while since I’ve really picked apart a text. I have tried to keep this blog centered on Nehemiah’s lessons (already well-picked back at the beginning), but sometimes it is important to zoom out and view a subject from afar. So I would like to explore the rebuilding of Jerusalem as part of a larger narrative.

One of the key points in the overarching biblical narrative is the division of the kingdom of Israel after King Solomon’s death, which ultimately led to both kingdoms being conquered and the collapse (discussed last time) that lasted until Nehemiah led a community-based effort to rebuild.

Solomon is regarded as a wise and good king, and although he certainly had his personal flaws he made the trains run on time and delivered a period of great prosperity. But he also represented the continuation of the concentration of wealth and power that had been corroding Jewish society ever since they did away with judges in favor of kings. When Solomon died, his son Rehoboam replaced him, bringing none of the good and even more bad.

1 Chron 10:13. And the king answered them harshly, and King Rehoboam disregarded the counsel of the elders. 14. And he spoke to them according to the counsel of the youths, saying, “[My father] made your yoke heavy, and I shall add to it; my father flogged you with whips, but I [shall do so] with scorpions.”

Now, look at this story as a parable and you’ll find that the United States is in the middle of something very similar:

Industrial capitalism was a hard master. It caused great disruption to rural communities and traditional ways of life. Many workers lost limbs and lives in the great mines and factories of 19th and 20th centuries. Capitalism built great wealth on the backs of exploited workers, but (to be fair) it did deliver a way of life that was far more affluent and generally comfortable than anything enjoyed (by non-elites) at any previous time in history.

But then things got out of hand. A headstrong new king arrived in the form of a fancypants global financial system that promised even greater affluence for the shrinking middle class. We didn’t have to even do the real work of building and growing things; we just had to engage in physically easy but emotionally and spiritually draining jobs that put us in front of computers all day doing “marketing” and “finance” while people far away had to deal with the grueling and often poisonous work of delivering our computers, food and other goodies.

Under our new financial king, it is no longer possible to support a household on most single incomes, especially not through most work that actually created food or material objects. What’s more, work has become impossible to escape for many, with all sorts of handheld devices taking up ever more of our time and attention.

I believe that the long-run view of Steve Jobs will be rather critical, as one of the people who ultimately did the most damage to our abilities to focus on the people and things around us. And I mention this because it shows the extent to which the system has hoodwinked us by making scorpions cute and cool. We don’t have taskmasters standing over us because we have been trained so well that such explicit power is no longer necessary and we embrace that which enslaves us.

But back to Rehoboam…

15. And the king did not heed the people because it was brought about by God, so that the Lord might establish His word that He spoke by the hand of Ahijah the Shilonite to Jeroboam the son of Nebat.

Is this saying that God’s will is for the people to be oppressed? That is certainly the interpretation that has been popular among those who seek to rationalize the unholy partnership between religious elites and an economic system that goes against some of the Bible’s core lessons. However, the prophesy mentioned was that 10 of the 12 tribes would break off and be ruled by Jeroboam (comparable to most of the United States seceding from our power centers of New York City and Washington, D.C.).  Essentially God was looking for a way to trigger an uprising against the corrupt powers and saw an opportunity in a young king who didn’t know his limits and sought to further tighten the screws of oppression without providing any discernable benefit.

As is often the case in biblical texts, God was right:

16. And all Israel [saw] that the king had not heeded them, and the people replied to the king, saying, “What share do we have in David? And no heritage in Jesse’s son. Each man, to your homes, O Israel! Now see your house, David!” And all Israel went to their homes. 17. But the Children of Israel who dwelt in the cities of Judah-Rehoboam reigned over them.

The people’s concern about their lack of a “share” is worth dwelling upon. They did not feel that they were invested in the benefit of what was happening, much in the way that most modern people do not own a significant share of their own workplaces and the other businesses on which they depend. Rehoboam’s young advisors now correspond to the “regulators” who come out of the banking system (Hello Tim Geithner!) and are utterly unable to confront its most serious abuses. And the result of it all is banks that were “too big to fail” are now even bigger and we’ve missed a key opportunity to fix the system.

So, like Occupy Wall Street, they tried to withdraw. However the power structure was strong enough to survive passive non-cooperation and it seems that Rehoboam was anxious to back up his fierce words with action.

18. And King Rehoboam sent Hadoram, who was appointed over the tax, and the Children of Israel pelted him with stones and he died, and King Rehoboam exerted himself to get up into his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. 19. And the Israelites rebelled against the house of David until this day.

So it sounds like the king barely escaped from some sort of riot, doesn’t it? After only three kings Israel had gone badly astray. The people’s request that Rehoboam be less cruel seems to mark the last serious attempt at popular guidance of society. The people tried to move back toward the more participatory ways found under the judges, but it was too late. The kingdom was already entrenched so there was nothing to do but fight.

Now, consider the sad state of American politics in this light – captive by big business, dependent on its campaign funding and utterly unable to hold our real king accountable and prevent it from tearing society apart.

It remains to be seen whether we in the United States and western Europe have already passed this point of return, at which  – like Libya, Syria and perhaps Egypt – the only way to uproot the thornbush of power is by burning it out. I certainly hope not, but the signs are ominous. The loss of popular control through “technocratic” governments in Italy and Greece as well as state takeovers of cities including Harrisburg and Atlantic City (with Detroit now in the crosshairs) are warning signs of the final collapse of democracy.

So does this mean that revolution is now necessary? I don’t think it is – at least not in the pitchforks and torches sense. However, we need to go beyond calling for reform, beyond even the relatively radical protest embodied in the Occupy movement.

As it happened, the revolt against Rehoboam was not violent beyond the killing of a particularly loathed official who was sent to force everyone back to work. And here’s where it gets really interesting.

After Rehoboam returned to his capital, he mustered the army to crush the uprising. But then something happened that would surprise most moderns but is perfectly consistent with how resistance played out in biblical stories:

2 But this word of the LORD came to Shemaiah the man of God: 3 “Say to Rehoboam son of Solomon king of Judah and to all Israel in Judah and Benjamin,4 ‘This is what the LORD says: Do not go up to fight against your fellow Israelites. Go home, every one of you, for this is my doing.’” So they obeyed the words of the LORD and turned back from marching against Jeroboam.

This shows the immense responsibility of people of faith during times of uprising. Some may claim that God put our leaders in place and we should not confront those leaders. But here we have God clearly taking sides, and in doing so preventing a whole lot of bloodshed.

There’s no way to tell which of us might have the chance to make a difference, and perhaps no individual might have the impact of Shemaiah, whose prophetic voice turned back an army. But you never know what little action will tip the balance, and it’s important to speak out from whatever perspective you have. If that isn’t religious, great. There’s plenty of work to be done in convincing folks that Occupy is part of a great tradition of people’s movements. But if you are of a more faithful persuasion, this would be a good time to study up on what your heart and your holy texts teach about these sorts of moments.

Biblical disasters – part III

Nearly two months ago, I ended a blog post with the following:

Nehemiah is one of the less otherworldly biblical stories, containing no accounts of anything supernatural ever happening. Nevertheless, to fully extract its meaning, we must take a look at how we view biblical texts through a modern, “scientific” lens. We must recognize that Sodom and Jerusalem were both cities that failed to live within their means, that ignored the signs until God (call it Nature or Reality if you must) forced their hands.

It is tempting for modern secular people to reduce the Bible to a collection of stories and symbolism at best, or an irrelevant bunch of hokum at worst. I know this temptation from experience.

What’s unfortunate about such a reduction is that it limits the secularist’s ability to learn from the stories even without believing their factual accuracy. Maybe nobody really turned into a pillar of salt, but does that make the lessons of Sodom any less important?

Now, by “lessons of Sodom” I’m not referring to anything about sex, per se. Indeed, one lesson from this story is how badly people can miss the point of the story. After all, the prophet Ezekiel tells that Sodom was destroyed for its sins of “pride, laziness and gluttony, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door.” (Ezek 16:49-50)

Think about Sodom as a city wracked by some combination of revolt and invasion, not unlike that which later burned Rome, reduced the Easter Islanders to a confused remnant that couldn’t even explain how its ancestors had built the giant statues that are the largest things on the island or left the great Mayan cities deserted and swallowed by the forest. Europe as a whole almost went the same route, with the basic tools of civilized life -literacy and numeracy, for example – preserved only by a handful of monastic orders.

Social collapse is not unique to the Bible, but nor are societies in the Bible somehow exempt from basic laws of nature like the carrying capacity of the land and the near-inevitability of revolution if wealth inequality is not addressed. Violation of these laws does not always result in a full-blown smiting in which a city is wiped off the face of the earth, but it can.

A not-quite total collapse is depicted in the later fall of Jerusalem (of which Ezekiel warned in the above passage). The destruction of this city, which ultimately lay in ruins for more than a century, has a clear link to environmental degradation, which made the land unable to support its human population. Once the people were removed, taken away into Exile in Babylon, “The land finally enjoyed its Sabbath rest, lying desolate for seventy years, just as the prophet had said.” (2 Chron 36:21)

It seems we are not the first people to ignore warnings of environmental trouble ahead.

We usually think of sabbaths in terms of a single day of the week, but a seventy-year rest? That’s a long recovery time to make up for a lot of missed rest. And this is where we really need to learn: Our society is hell-bent on growth at all times and at all costs, and of course that’s not possible in the real world with its seasons and very definite limits to a small planet in vast space.

I just read “Toward a Jubilee Economy & Ecology in the Modern World” by Rabbi Arthur Waskow. It’s one of those pieces of writing that show up at just the right time (Thanks Mir!), and it has provided some nice material for tonight’s post. Waskow hypothesized that roughly every 50 years the economy will naturally grind to a halt, either joyfully or painfully:

Once every 50 years or so, if there is no redistribution of wealth and power there is a Great Depression. Why should this be so? Because over an entire generation, if the poor get poorer and the rich get richer there are more and more troublesome frictional effects. The poor become less able to buy what the institutions are producing and there emerges a glut of unused productive capacity…

Now in an odd way the Jubilee Year would itself be an economic “depression”: everybody is unemployed, the whole social apparatus stops. The difference is in the sharing. In a modern depression, the poor suffer terribly, most of the middle class a great deal, and some of the rich may lose their shirts. The burdens are unequal, and the pain of the “resting” that benefits the whole society is imposed on only some of its members. The Jubilee shares the “pain” of resting for in the short run, there might have been less to eat if for two years in a row no one had sown, cultivated, or reaped and turns the pain into a communal celebration.

To borrow another thought from Waskow’s other writings (I don’t recall the work, but this is one of those Great Thoughts that put him forever on my radar so I know he wrote it somewhere), the concept of Sabbath is not a law in the moral sense. It is more like a law of physics that we are completely incapable of breaking in the long run – no matter how naughty we might be. So either we find an orderly way to work Sabbath into our lives, or it will work its way in on its own terms in ways we are likely to enjoy less.

Back in today’s reading, Waskow also proposed:

a universal national “Sabbath” on all but life preserving emergency services.

Such a festival would give our society in a regular, chosen rhythm what only a few cities now experience only in a random, unchosen way. For such “festivals” now occur only when a great blizzard clogs the whole town with snow. Observers report that the first reaction is panic, an hysterical attempt to get to work. When it becomes clear that no one can work, a mood of joy and festive calm spreads across the city. Everyone shares: food, stories, emergency assistance. People play in the snow. It is a day of unemployment but in a mood of holiday, holy day. Much more a holy day, in fact, than most of the commercialized holidays that have been made occasions not of rest but of turning on the “consumption economy.”

This strikes me as particularly interesting because Waskow has turned disaster on its head. Ordinarily, those who see the Hand of God moving think of disasters as divine punishment. Most notoriously some declared Hurricane Katrina to be God’s wrath against sexual deviance in New Orleans even though the storm’s eye actually hit relatively-tame Mississippi.

But can disasters, in a sense, be a loving correction? Can they point us toward a safer, saner and more sustainable future?

Perhaps they can. If we are willing to learn. A blizzard is one thing, causing great disruption but minimal damage. But a major hurricane, tornado outbreak or earthquake is not much of a festival. Lives are lost and permanently altered in usually unpleasant ways. Even so, disasters point to our weaknesses and let us know that we must seriously attend to that which we prefer to neglect. Hurricane Katrina, oddly enough, was a perfect example of this, forcing us to look at the poverty and degradation of infrastructure that our high-rolling lifestyle has wrought.

New Orleans would not have survived Katrina on its own. As an independent nation-state it almost certainly would have become shorthand for unspeakable destruction – a modern day Sodom – left to molder away and sink into the swamps. The people of Baton Rouge would now whisper the name of the dark city whose corpse still looms out there among the bayous. But because New Orleans is part of a huge confederation of cities, it was able to draw support from its sisters and survive to fight another day.

Unfortunately, the whole family is not so strong these days. This year’s string of disasters has cast a stark light on the fiscal limitations of our nation’s ability to recover from injury. We seem to have mainly dodged the bullet as (so far) it’s been a quiet fall other than a few huge storms. So disasters are back off the front page. But the limits of our resilience is out there, lurking.

Religiously-minded folk might say that God has warned us. But whatever one’s perspective, its a warning.