What Does the Bible Say, Really?

There are some things we just don’t think about.

Susan Thistlewaite, Chicago Theological Seminary professor, author and scholar, gives some sobering information in her latest book, Occupy the Bible. She says that we ought to read the Bible from the perspective of the homeless, the hungry, the economically stressed.

It was from their perspective that Jesus formed his ministry, she says …and the Bible says.

In a workshop she gave, she said, “Student debt is approaching one trillion dollars. That’s more than credit card debt and if the trend continues, in a few years, student debt will be higher than the national debt. We need to read the Bible from that perspective.”

Students are stressed out and depressed. They have gone to school and gotten degrees, only to find that they are not able to get work, or enough money to pay their student loans.”Students are stressed out and depressed,” Thistlewaite said. “Some are committing suicide.”

There are a lot of reasons for the economic state of this nation, but greed is a big one, posits Thistlewaite. Greed has led banks and other financial institutions, including those which dole out student loans, to go haywire, thinking not about the people who are getting the loans they are giving out but instead by the profit they will make off people who are really trying to make an honest living.

Jesus was a revolutionary, primarily because he challenged the Roman government. He didn’t get into trouble because he taught people to love; he got in trouble because he challenged the status quo. He got into trouble because he taught people that the kingdom in which they should seek comfort was the heavenly kingdom, where there was fairness and equality amongst people,  not the earthly kingdom, headed by the Romans, which led people into economic despair and support economic inequality.

“Theology begins where pain is,” says Thistlewaite. And clearly, there is pain amongst the people who are working and still cannot make ends meet. That group includes students, but also the so-called “working poor,” who, in spite of working sometimes two and three jobs, are still struggling to keep their heads above water. The economic state of our nation is slowly wiping out the middle class, and, observes Thistlewaite, there can be no democracy without a middle class.

Our economic dilemma is made all the worse as the issue is argued using the Bible as justification for both liberal and conservative positions. Thistlewaite says that “the Right thinks the Bible supports free market capitalism.” The Left, conversely, uses the Bible to support an economy which supports equal distribution of wealth. Parables, like found in the Book of Matthew 25:14-30, where a wealthy landowner gave three different “slaves” (translated from the Greek “doulos”) rewarded the two who multiplied money given to them, and cast out the one who hid the money given to him, invite two different interpretations, one from the Left, one from the Right. Who, in that parable and others, is doing the will of God, asks Thistlewaite.

One Bible. Two desperately different interpretations …and the odd men out are the struggling, working poor.

We don’t want to think about the state of our economy or what God really demands. It is totally inconceivable to me that anyone would think that God supports poverty or the abject and real suffering that is endured by the working poor, just as it is inconceivable to me that a good God would support racism or sexism or militarism. I grew up believing that a good God wanted all people to be taken care of, that God wanted economic and social justice for all people. Is that naive?

Neither the Hebrew Scriptures nor the New Testament, naiveté notwithstanding, seem to support misery, with a very few people being very comfortable at the expense of many poor people suffering. People got into big trouble with God in the Bible for not being hospitable, not taking care of widows and the poor. God didn’t change, did He/She?

There are some things we don’t want to think about it, but we need to. Bottom line, there’s too much suffering caused by economic distress, in this, the wealthiest nation in the world.

A candid observation …

Visit Thistlewaite’s website at http://www.occupythebible.org

Even Urban Kids …

In an interview of Vincent Harding done by Krista Tippet, Harding talked about his commitment to young people, speaking to their hope and their desire to effect change. He recounted a story of youth from Philadelphia who visited him in Colorado. They were greeted with love and respect and one young man asked Harding, “Uncle Vincent,” (they had begun calling him that), “how can you love us so much?”

The question was a powerful one for Harding because it spoke to these young people who still had hope untapped within them. They were clearly “urban” youth in appearance, Harding said; they dressed, spoke and behaved as the stereotypical urban young person is wont to do. But the question from the young man belied a part of urban youth that is typically ignored or even thought to exist: souls that yearn to be loved, appreciated, respected…and serve.

Harding’s story reminded me of an encounter I had some years ago. I was speaking to an unruly crowd in a high school in Columbus, Ohio. To say they were unruly is an understatement, actually. They were rude and loud …and were not the least bit interested in hearing my little presentation on Black History. It was important to me…but I am afraid I failed in communicating my love for black history to them.

After the presentation, I had the audacity to ask them if there were any questions. I was quite ready and prepared to just exit the stage and the auditorium… to my surprise, a young woman, very pretty, raised her hand. I asked her if she would stand, and she ignored me. I asked her again…standing would help me and others hear her question, but, egged on by her peers, she refused and made a rude comment. I had to hold myself back; I am “old school,” and was taught that youth are to respect their “elders.”  I wanted to remind her who the elder was in this moment.

But I was silent. I listened to her question and answered as best I could. Not a moment too soon, my time with this assembly was done. I was on the front row, gathering my things, when to my surprise, standing in front of me was the young woman who had asked the question.

I looked up …and was surprised. In her eyes were giant crocodile tears. She said, “I am sorry I was rude. I thought you were good…I just want to know, how do I know God loves me?”

I had to choke back my own tears.  This girl, who could not have been much more than 16, was pleading for help. I supposed that among her peers, it would have seemed “uncool” to appear interested or to come off “polite.” Yet, there she stood, the tears in her eyes telling the story of the pain in her spirit. She wanted love. She had something to give but without love, it was never going to come out.

I hugged her and answered her as best I could. I gave her some books she could read. And I told her she could contact me at the church whenever she wanted. I never heard from her again. I hope she graduated and went to college and is in the process of loving this society of which she is a part.

The story of the young man who questioned Dr. Harding, and the young woman who questioned me, tells me that instead of complaining that urban kids are unruly, bad and impossible to deal with, there ought to be more of us looking for ways to reach their spirits and souls. They are human beings, not urban objects. They have songs to sing, the songs of talent and gifts they were meant to share with the world. I am almost sure there would be fewer gangs if more of us could find a way to reach these kids, too many of whom feel unloved and unneeded.

Just this weekend, Hadiya Pendleton was buried, an innocent victim of yet another shooting in Chicago. She made a plea for there to be fewer gangs, but that will never happen if kids keep growing up feeling worthless. It seems that the gang activity, the behavior that causes so many shootings in urban areas, is more a function of kids failing to thrive because of lack of positive attention and pouring into their young minds and spirits. It would not be surprising if the person who shot young Hadiya was performing some sort of initiation ritual for a group of young boys who have banded and bonded together in order to feel respected, loved and needed. Left with far too much time on their own, they devise ways to find that which every human being needs.

I read a story shared by Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t until she left the safe confines of her all-black community and went out into the world that she felt the alienation that so many urban kids feel within their own communities. She was looking for a job to earn money for college, but she had cut job postings out of the white section of the newspaper, and was rebuffed again and again by incredulous white employers who told her over and over that they “didn’t hire colored.”

She was getting used to that, but came to watershed moment when, one day in her native Memphis, a thunderstorm began while she was out looking for a job. Her grandmother, “old school,” had taught her that one remains inside, quiet and if at all possible, hidden while the storm was on. The storm was to be respected, her grandmother would say, because “God was doing his work.” Being in the midst of such a storm, outside in it, for goodness’ sake, went against everything she had been taught. Yet, when she looked at building to which she might have run for cover, she saw white faces looking at her, with the unspoken sentence, “not in here you won’t come.”

She didn’t try. She walked to the “black side” of town to try to find shelter, but ended up getting on the bus. She was angry. She felt the lack of love and concern and respect for her being just because she was black. She defiantly sat in the “white” section of the bus, on the front side seat. Nobody bothered her.

The difference between Gwendolyn and our kids is that Gwendolyn had a movement into which to pour her anger, creativity and dreams. She was enveloped by people, black and white, who loved her and showed her respect. Any possibility of failure to thrive was cut short by the people who stood in the breach.

There seem to be too few people standing in the breach, and so young innocent children, like Hadiya, are cut down before they get to give to the world their unique gifts. The children who are rude and defiant now were not born that way. They were created and shaped by all sorts of factors.

There are a lot of young urban girls and boys with “crocodile tears” in their eyes and spirits. We just have to take the time to look for them.

A candid observation…

Dorner Must Not Have Known

Chris Dorner, the ex-Los Angeles police officer, must not have known that injustice…is real.

The story about  Dorner,  who has gone on a shooting rampage targeting other police officers, is intriguing and troubling, yet it speaks to some truths that we all live with.

Dorner has apparently snapped because of a grudge he has been holding for a number of years. According to news reports, he feels that he was unjustly fired from the Los Angeles Police Department. He is angry, according to reports, that “his truth” was not accepted and despite his best efforts to seek justice for himself, he failed.

A court upheld the action taken by the police department. The court hearing his case was apparently his hope, but his last hope, and when the court supported the police department, it was too much for Dorner.

In 2007, Dorner was a probationary police officer involved in the arrest of a man in San Pedro. He, along with his training officer, Teresa Evans, responded to a complaint of a man causing a disturbance in a hotel lobby. According to news reports, they found the man sitting outside the hotel when they arrived. They tried to take him into custody but he arrested. Dorner apparently wrestled him to the ground and Evans allegedly tasered him, after which the suspect surrendered to police.

A couple of weeks later, however, Dorner went to a sergeant and said that Evans, his partner and training officer, had kicked the suspect after he was down, after he had surrendered. The complaint was investigated by the police and was found to be unwarranted. Apparently Dorner had waited too long to report the apparent and alleged misconduct of Evans…That fact, coupled with the fact that hotel employees questioned would not corroborate Dorner’s claim, resulted in the investigation being ruled in Evans’ favor and Dorner being fired from the police force. Dorner was found guilty of having made untrue statements against a superior officer.

Dorner rose up in protest, taking his case to court. But the court, the center of the justice system, was not doling out the justice that Dorner sought, either.It seemed that nobody would listen to him and his rage grew deeper and deeper.

Injustice really does exist.

Dorner, who had also served in the military, learned this sad fact. He dared report his training officer, waiting two weeks to do so …and it backfired on him. What would have happened had he reported the alleged kicking of the suspect immediately? We do not know, but it is safe to assume that he was probably afraid to do so. It is safe to assume that what he saw bothered him so much, though, that he decided to take the risk and report one of his own. It didn’t work. At the end of the day, he was odd man out.

Dorner, one guesses, believed in justice and in the power of truth. He forgot, however, that police have been known to protect each other from the most heinous wrongs and accusations. He was not “in” the department yet; he was in training. He apparently did not understand that police officers, from what we read, protect their own, no matter what. If he was going to go against “his own” while he was in training, if he was that brash and arrogant, he was too big a risk to let “into” the ranks completely. He had to go.

The witnesses at the hotel who would not support Dorner’s version of what happened might very well have been visited by police and encouraged to support the official police version of what happened. It has been done before. Police know how to protect each other.

A report issued after Dorner’s claims were investigated by police said, “”The delay in reporting the alleged misconduct coupled with the witness’ statements irreparably destroy Dorner’s credibility, and bring into question his suitability for continued employment as a police officer.”  A story on CNN.com said, “The report found Dorner had made false statements to a superior while reporting the allegation that Evans had kicked the suspect and to internal affairs investigators looking into the claim.” (see http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/07/us/lapd-attacks-dorner/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

Dorner couldn’t take it. He expected that someone would listen and support him, but it didn’t happen. People have a tendency that truth will always trump a lie or a series of lies, but that is not the case, not in life. Too often, lies trump and truth has to fight hard in order to bring the lies and liars down. In that process, many turn angry and bitter and disillusioned, which apparently is where Dorner found himself.

He had to live with the reality that injustice exists.

Unfortunately Dorner expected the justice system to hear him, hear his truth, and rule in his favor, but it didn’t happen. Equally unfortunate is the fact that the justice system has too often been guilty of not rendering justice, putting far too many people in prison for crimes they did not commit. According to a book written by Jim and Nancy Petro, False Justice, it is also true that even when there is compelling evidence that a guilty verdict was incorrect, the justice system is slow to consider that evidence and in many cases, ignores it. Jim and Nancy are not bleeding heart Liberals; they are steadfast Republicans who have seen the ravages of injustice within the justice system and are speaking out about it.

The reality that justice is elusive and that life isn’t fair renders people who know they are innocent to a state of despair. From what has been printed about Dorner, it seems that he is in despair, feeling like there is nowhere to go and nobody who will listen to him.

What he is doing is not going to clear his name. He will go down in history as a villain because he killed fellow police officers. What is sad is that he is feeling that his fellow police officers were not there for him, and many officers who break the code of silence practiced by police know that very feeling.

The prayer is that Dorner stops killing people soon, that he is captured before he harms any more innocent people. But from a distance, it is easy to believe that what Dorner said he saw really happened. He naively thought that this world and our justice system, beginning with police, is about justice. He sounds like he was an idealist, believing that the police are “the good guys.” Sometimes they are. Many times, they are not, and they are expert at covering up their wrongs.

He didn’t know that, apparently. He didn’t know that injustice happens, perpetrated and  supported too many times by the ones in charge of protecting people.

A candid observation …

 

Leaving the Cocoon

Sometimes, you have to be snatched out of your comfort zone in order to move into the next phase of your life.

I have written about myself being reclusive, comfortably snug in a cocoon of my own making. I have known for a while that I needed to come of out the cocoon, but I have been reluctant to do so. So, God snatched me out.

The will of God, I believe, is for us all to be all He/She created us to be. The recent economic crisis has resulted in not a few people realizing, or discovering, parts of themselves that they didn’t know existed. Entrepreneurs have been born out of despair and panic.

God must be smiling.

There is something about being out of a cocoon that is radically liberating. Scary …but liberating…because being out of one’s comfort zone and thrown off the cliff, so to speak, and being told to fly is a tipping point. You either fly, flapping the wings you didn’t know you had …or you crash and burn.

In trying to figure out how to flap the wings you didn’t even realize you had, you lose the time you had to concentrate on feeling afraid or angry because of your situation. You have too much work to do. To worry or give too much time to what caused you to be “out there” is to pull valuable time away from learning how to discover and then use the wings you always had.

I think God must rejoice at times like these. God must smile and say, “finally.” So many of us remain closed up in our cocoons and never get to experience the freedom that comes when one is out of it, so when some of us break free, or, as in my case, are snatched out, God surely must smile.

The late Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote an amazing, book called God In Search of Man.  In it, he writes that “self-deception is the chief source of corruption in religious thinking, more deadly than error.” He also writes that “religion is liable to distortion from without and to corruption from within …Faith, in its zeal, tends to become bigotry.”

It occurs to me that many of us commit bigotry against ourselves, blaming religion and religious teaching for the same.  We discriminate against ourselves and hold ourselves back because of our lack of faith in ourselves and in God, who desires that we fly.  When we commit bigotry against ourselves, we are more likely to feel bigotry from others because we have created a spiritual culture in which bigotry, whether self-imposed or from the outside, can and does flourish.

Staying in a safe place, in a cocoon, is a petri dish in which self-deceptive words, feelings and attitudes multiply and too many of us do not realize how we are blocking the will of God, which is that all of us would be free.

Religious doctrine and political ideology have been blamed for a lot of the non-movement of human beings, but the fact is that many of us have prevented ourselves from moving. We don’t dare.  We would rather be holed up in an old cocoon than to burst out of it, “following our bliss,” as Joseph Campbell advises us all to do. And in not following our bliss, too many of remain dolefully unhappy and unfulfilled in these very few days we are allotted on earth.

If being in relationship with God is supposed to be liberating, which I believe it is, then many of us “cocoon dwellers” miss it., Richard Rohr writes, “… but in most of history the priestly tradition has been in control and defined religion. “Leviticus and Numbers” usually trump any real exoduses from slavery to freedom.” That phrase struck me, as I realize many of us enslave ourselves, in spite of deep religious beliefs. We humans all need a personal Exodus experience, and Rohr writes that it is as much an internal as an external journey. That’s what “liberation theology” is basically about…but too many of us don’t understand.

I didn’t understand, and so God snatched me out of my cocoon. I was so comfortable there;  I yearn for it at times …but I am kind of liking this feeling of wings that are slowly drying out and spreading. I am beginning to live my way into a new way of thinking. Wings are spreading, slowly …

It’s better than the cocoon.

A candid observation …

God’s Ways…are NOT Our Ways

A few days ago I was reading the story of John the Baptist, holed up in prison for having irritated Herod because “The Baptist” disapproved of  Antipas’ marriage to his own brother’s former wife, and Herod feared an uprising, according to the historian Josephus. John the Baptist had apparently said, out loud, that he disapproved of Herod’s marriage “to your brother’s former wife.” That woman, then, named Herodias, hated “The Baptist,” and when her daughter Salome danced for her and Herod, Herod was so inspired that he said to Salome, “whatever you want, ask, and I will get it for you.” Herodias saw her chance, conspired with Salome, and with her mother’s prodding, asked for the head of John the Baptist’ head, delivered to her mother on a platter.

As I read that story, and talked about it with a few students, I asked them what they thought about what this story tells us about “God‘s ways.” Here sat John in prison, for doing what his loyalty to God and belief in God’s command to him to “speak truth to power,” and he apparently was not feeling the presence of God. His situation so bothered him that he sent some of his friends to Jesus, who was nearby, to ask Jesus, “Are you the Messiah, or should we look for someone else?” That meant, to me at least, that John was feeling the absence of God when he needed to feel the presence of God most. His unasked question seemed to be, “would God really let this happen to me? Would God not send his son Jesus, who has done so much good for people he hasn’t even known, to rescue me or save me, at least, from death?”

Jesus answered, telling John’s “people” to remind “The Baptist” of how he healed the sick, made the blind see, helped the deaf to hear …basically giving a review of all he had done and was doing, which was not news to John. He knew that. His immediate unasked but internalized question, though, went unanswered. “Aren’t you going to save me?”

The answer was no. “The Baptist” was beheaded later that month, according to historian Josephus. God’s ways are NOT our ways.

There is value in studying God’s ways, even when or especially when, we do not understand something that is going on in our own lives. I would imagine that some of the parents of the children who were shot and killed in Newtown in December 2012 asked God something like, “Would God really have allowed this to happen?” I would imagine that the tragedy that left former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to be shot and severely injured left someone asking, “Would God have allowed this to happen?” So many times, in so many situations, personal and public, things happen that make people who believe in God scratch their divine-leaning hearts and ask, “Where was God? Why didn’t God stop this?”

Richard Rohr wrote that we cannot think our way into doing something different; we must do some things to get ourselves into another way of thinking. I am still pondering that thought. How would doing that make us more ably handle the things that happen to us that we do not understand, and that either are unfair or certainly feel unfair? And if we were able to do that, when we would find ourselves in a prison of pain or confusion or grief so deep that we cannot reach the bottom, would there be a peace about us, making us know that our ways truly are not God’s ways?

The truth is, sometimes, perhaps many times, God DOES allow bad things to happen to us or in our lives. God allowed Joseph to be terrorized by his brothers, left for dead. God allowed Job to lose everything except his own miserable life. God allowed the children to die in Newtown, God has allowed racism and sexism and homophobia to exist, alongside white supremacy. God allowed the storm in Joplin, Missouri, that killed so many and caused so much destruction; God allowed Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, storms which absolute wreaked havoc on innocent people, many of them too poor to be able to even jump in a car and get out of harm’s way.  God allowed the Holocaust and the Inquisition and Crusades. God allows rampant gun violence in urban areas, responsible for the deaths of way too many children and young adults, but we don’t dare talk about ways to get handguns off the streets and out of the markets! God is allowing scores of children in our United States to suffer from hunger, even though it is said this country grows enough food so that nobody has to go hungry. God has allowed and does allow bad things to happen to really good people, and as we can see from the John the Baptist story, this tendency of God is not a new thing.

In a strange way, knowing that can give comfort. At least we know that this is really the same God that has always existed. Jesus’ answer to John, and God’s answer to Job, were not particularly comforting, in that neither God nor Jesus gave the hard, quick, direct answers that those men and we who have read their stories wanted. No, both deities recited all the divine work they were doing and had done…and apparently, freeing and saving John or giving Job an answer for his dilemma, was not in the Divine Planner.

And yet, these two men believed, as have countless people who have been in a fire of some sort and either come out burned or not come out at all. God blessed Job once his wager with The Adversary was done; John didn’t fare so well. But it is apparent that John, once he received Jesus’ answer about what he was going and had done, calmed down and rested in his faith.

So, since we will never understand God’s ways, we have an assignment to learn all we can about how to live in faith, regardless of what is going on in our lives. We still fight for what is right and just, because injustice is and always has been, a major problem in this world…but we fight for it because it IS the right thing to do, not because we think we are going to get a nice, succinct answer from God on why things are as they are, why they are so slow to change, or why God allows suffering to exist. We do it because by doing it it shows we are “righteous,” that is, in right relationship with God, and that has its own rewards.

A candid observation …