Heart of Gold, or Has God Turned His Back on America?

 In The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (specifically, the BBC radio version, which is the original format), Arthur Dent finds himself dragged from Earth onto a Vogon spaceship, from which he is flung into empty space, only to be rescued in the nick of time by the star-ship Heart of Gold, by a miraculous coincidence. This ship is powered by the new Infinite Improbability Drive, and because it was operating at the time at infinite improbability, the ship made the rescue all by itself. But there was one more amazing coincidence waiting for Arthur Dent when he got to the bridge of the Heart of Gold. I won't tell you what it was: you'll have to listen to the story.
Similarly, a series of coincidences happened recently which ended in a similar way. A friend from choir, named Davis, has taken up the french horn again after a gap of many years. A month ago he was at the International Horn Symposium at Ithaca College, NY when he met a fellow horn player named Barbara. They got to talking, including the standard "where are you from?". When Davis said that he was from the Norfolk area, Barbara mentioned that her son, Bill, is in Norfolk. Davis asked whether he was in the Navy--a really good guess, in general--and Barbara said that he is, and is a submariner. So Davis mentioned that he sits next to a submariner in choir, and Barbara asked the name of this submariner. After protesting that she wouldn't know him, Davis finally said "Robie ..." at which point Barbara finished his sentence "Armbruster. He's a really good friend of my son's." So they talked about me for a while, and Barbara gave Davis presents to bring to both Bill and me. I was finally able to set up a meeting at our house to make the introductions. Bill was the first to arrive, with his wife and son Ian. When Davis arrived, I started to introduce him to Bill when Ian asked Davis "what are you doing here?" The final coincidence was that Davis and Ian had been in sight-singing class together!
There have been other coincidences recently. For example, my wife decided on a whim one day to have lunch at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens and invited me to join her. There, we ran into our old Tai Chi instructor. It was almost as if it had been planned.

But the coincidence I want to write about today concerns a Tweet posted on Facebook recently by one of my friends. You can see it at right: "God has not forgotten about America, America has forgotten about God." It fits with a common theme among my more conservative friends: if America would just turn back to God, by which we really mean become more Christian, then society's ills would reduce.
By coincidence that night I read chapter 2 of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's book The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem. The book considers the final week of Jesus before his crucifixion, as told in Mark's Gospel. Borg, a noted New Testament scholar, emphasizes that the Gospels should not, in general, be fused together to give a blended picture of Jesus, as is done so often in school Nativity productions (the Magi and the shepherds do not appear together in the Bible), or in accounts of the crucifixion. Borg and Crossan are definitely on the liberal end of the spectrum, and their views on the historical Jesus are very controversial. But both are noted Jesus scholars; Borg has been esteemed as "a respectable scholar and valuable dialogue partner" who should not be ignored.
After reading this chapter, my conclusion is that it is at least equally, if not more, valid to say that:

God has turned his back on America

Chapter two of  The Last Week covers Mark 11:12-19, relating events of the Monday after Palm Sunday. My New Oxford Annotated Bible describes this passage (actually verses 12-25) as "Prophetic demonstration against the Temple," which is a better description (as we shall see) than the more common "cleansing of the Temple." This is the day that Jesus enters the temple and creates havoc:

And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, "Is it not written,

'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'?

But you have made it a bandits' stronghold."

And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

New Revised Standard Version, adopting "bandits' stronghold" rather than "den of robbers", as suggested by the notes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible and Marcus Borg

This passage is often misunderstood, and it doesn't help that Jesus did not make a habit of explaining his meaning very fully. We once spent a considerable amount of time in Sunday School discussing whether it was appropriate for us to be selling Christmas wreaths and Christmas presents consisting of donations to Heifer International in the church foyer. I had long assumed that Jesus was protesting against the actions of the money changers and the dove sellers, who were making a profit out of the faithful. But I was wrong.
First, let's examine what Jesus said. We have to remember that he was speaking (teaching) to an audience that had good knowledge of the Tanakh, which we call the Old Testament. He starts with a quote from Isaiah 56:7:

these will I bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord God,
who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
besides those already gathered.

New Revised Standard Version (emphasis added)

To fully understand the context, we need to look at the more complete passage Isaiah 56:1-8. Isaiah tells the Israelites that God welcomes eunuchs and foreigners who keep the Sabbath and hold fast to His covenant, even in His house of prayer. (Foreigners here refers to proselytes, those who have converted to Judaism, and thus keep the Sabbath). But the Israelites didn't: Deuteronomy 23:1-8 excludes from the community men with genital mutilation, as well as certain ethnic categories. Both the Deuteronomy and the Isaiah passages are expressed as commands from God, yet they are contradictory.
Here we see the difference between two types of wisdom, which Marcus Borg, in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, calls conventional wisdom and alternative wisdom. Deuteronomy is a collection of conventional wisdom, the wisdom of a culture, or what today might be called common sense. It is the same kind of wisdom behind forbidding gay marriage: everybody just knows that it is wrong--it's common sense. But Duncan Watts explains how reasoning from common sense is often wrong in his book Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us.
Isaiah presents alternative wisdom, which Borg also calls subversive wisdom. I prefer the term prophetic wisdom. When we think of a prophet as prophesying, we often think he is foretelling future events. To prophesy can mean this, but it also means to speak as a prophet (definitions here are from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 6th edn.). A prophet is a "revealer or interpreter of God's will" (again, C-OED), and in the bible the prophets were often pointing out the ills of society, and how society was deviating from God's will. It could be a dangerous thing to do. We turn next to Jeremiah who, in chapter 26, was told by the priests and the people whom he had rebuked "you shall die!" The prophetic actions of Jesus received the same response.
Returning to Jesus, he was speaking in the Court of the Gentiles, a massive raised platform erected at great cost by Herod when he refurbished the Temple. This court was open to all, and so it was "a house of prayer for all peoples." It was also where the money changers provided the opportunity for people coming from far away to exchange funds to the only type of money allowed to be used in the Temple. The dove sellers were also engaged in legal, and necessary, commerce: providing pure animals for the various offerings required to be made at the Temple.
So why did Jesus call the Temple a den of thieves, or more accurately a bandit's stronghold? His outrage was not directed at the merchants, but at what the Temple had become. To understand this, we have to look at the other passage he quotes, from Jeremiah 7. Starting in verse 5:

For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever.
Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, "We are safe!"--only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?
New Revised Standard Version (emphasis added)

Jeremiah, bringing the people of Judah the word of God, told them that they could not act unjustly in the world, but then go into the Temple and be safe, saying the deceptive words "this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" (Jeremiah 7:4). God goes on to tell Jeremiah not to bother praying for the people of Judah, looking for Him to intercede on their behalf, because He will not listen (Jeremiah 7:16).

Without justice, God will not listen to prayer

Prophets tell people uncomfortable truths. And Jeremiah is telling the Judeans that it does no good to claim that they are God's chosen people, and assume that He will always dwell with them, He will continue to dwell with them, but only if they do not oppress the alien, the orphan, the widow, or shed innocent blood, or go after other gods.

The theme in both Isaiah and Jeremiah is justice. Justice towards the proselyte (today, the legal immigrant), justice towards the alien (undocumented alien?), justice towards those who cannot support themselves (orphans and widows in Old Testament times, but a wider swath of society today), justice towards the eunuch (today, the LGBT community). Prayer, faith, these are all very well--but if we cannot show each other justice, God is not interested in our prayer.
By quoting these passages, Jesus has given us an indication of the point he is making by his actions in the Temple. But Mark provides us some further help to understand.

What is with the fig tree?

There is a "church" which gains notoriety by picketing military funerals with signs that say "God hates fags." This has prompted a humorous response, saying that actually God hates figs, not fags, based on Mark 11:12-14.

On the following day, when they came from Bethany,he was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again." And his disciples heard it.

Mark often frames his stories: he starts one story, pauses to tell another story, then finishes the first story. The two accounts relate to each other, and provide context and explanation. The condemnation of the fig tree is the first part of such a frame. It is followed by the passage with which we started, in which Jesus disrupts the Temple. Continuing from Mark 11:20, we get the end of the fig tree story:

In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. Then Peter remembered and said to him, "Rabbi, look? The fig tree that you cursed has withered." Jesus answered them, "Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and if you do not doubt in your heat, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."

It was useless of Jesus to go to the fig tree and expect to find figs, because it was not the season for figs. In the same way, Mark is explaining, it is useless for the Jewish people to go to the Temple to be with God, because He "is a God of justice and righteousness and when worship substitutes for justice, God rejects God's temple—or, for us today, God's church." (Borg & Crossan, 2006, p. 49). Or what we like to think of as God's country: America.
The actions of Jesus are not directed against the merchants: they are directed against the Temple authorities. By his disruption in the Court of the Gentiles, Jesus is symbolically shutting down the Temple, just as he literally "shut down" the fig tree. The Temple has stopped bearing fruit. And the mountain on which the Temple stands can be thrown into the sea.
It helps to have studied the previous day--Palm Sunday--in Mark to understand further. The religious and political elite in Jerusalem, who control the Temple, have been making themselves rich on the backs of the poor. Although Mosaic law forbade the purchase of land at the time, the urban rich were acquiring land by making loans to peasant land-holders, then seizing the land when the owners defaulted. And the final straw was the negotiation with the Romans: the Temple was now used not only to collect the Temple tax, but also the tax for the Romans. The Temple had become a very ambiguous entity, and a symbol for the subjugation of the rest of society. The way Borg paints the picture of the entry into Jerusalem on an ass, one can picture the people with Jesus, not only crying "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!", but also carrying signs saying "Occupy Jerusalem" and "We are the 99%".

Prayer AND Justice

Thus says the Lord:
Maintain justice, and do what is right,
for soon my salvation will come,
and my deliverance be revealed.
Jeremiah 56:1, NRSV

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus, all tell us that we must have justice as well as prayer to be living the life God desires for us, and that He is not open to our worship if we cannot have justice.
There is a wonderful nine-minute video of an Orthodox priest demonstrating the different views of salvation using folding chairs. In what he calls the Protestant view of salvation, when man sins, God turns his back on man, and stays that way until man repents and turns back to God. In the Orthodox view, however much man sins, which is to say turns his back on God, God repositions Himself to face man, continuously offering salvation through Grace.

The view being presented by Jesus in the Temple somewhat resembles the Protestant view: the Temple is closed for business until man can restore justice.
How does this apply to our country today? We tend to see ourselves as the followers of Jesus, both the early Jewish ones crying Hosanna at the gate of Jerusalem, and the later ones meeting in small communities huddled over the latest letter from Paul. We like to think that we, as Christians, are being persecuted because we are not permitted to use the power of the government to enforce our beliefs on others.
Unfortunately, the way things are in our country today, most of us need to see ourselves more as the Pharisees and Romans, working feverishly to maintain our privilege in an unjust society. In his wonderful book Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman draws a striking parallel between the Jewish peasantry in the time of Jesus and the American black community in the 1940s. He points to how the teachings of Jesus can restore the dignity of the black man, even in the face of continuing oppression, in the same way that it was designed to restore the dignity of the Jewish man in the face of Roman oppression. Many of the aphorisms rather unfortunately gathered together in the Sermon on the Mount apply:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile."
Matthew 5:38-41

 A Roman could strike a Jew without fear of repercussion--indeed, he could kill a Jew, and there was no law that could touch the him. In first century Palestine, Jewish lives did not matter. Similarly, a Roman could tell a Jew to carry his luggage, and the Jew was required by law to carry it for him for one mile. What Jesus tells the Jews to do is to take back the initiative. You strike me, because I offer you my face to strike, I give you my cloak because that is my will, and I decide to carry your luggage for two miles. Because I am now in control, my dignity is restored.
Clearly the conditions for black people in America in the 1940s were very different from today. How can I claim that there is still not justice? Why do we think we need a #blacklivesmatter movement? To explain, I need to go all the way back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida in 2012. There was outrage. And those of us sitting in the safety of our homes ascribed the outrage to the fact that a white (even if Hispanic) man shot a black (unarmed) teenager. But we were wrong. Black teenagers, armed and unarmed, are shot every day, and we don't express outrage over that. Where the outrage came from, at least in my case, was that the case gave the appearance that the authorities were ready to wash their hands of the whole affair. (The implicit reference to Pontius Pilate is no mistake.) It appeared that it was acceptable for a white man to shoot an unarmed black teenage boy, kill him, tell the authorities that he was "standing his ground", and the authorities respond "OK, never mind then; no harm done" because, after all, he was just a black teenager. And Trayvon Martin was almost certainly doing something wrong--he was black. George Zimmerman (the local Neighborhood Watch coordinator) here stands in the place of the Roman; Trayvon Martin in the place of the Jew. This view is also demonstrated in the academic article The Determinants of Punishment: Deterrence, Incapacitation and Vengeance. The authors provide the startling statistic from the Bureau of Justice Statistics national data set that victim race is a significant determinant in the length of sentence awarded for vehicular homicide. "Drivers who kill black victims get substantially shorter sentences" (Glaeser & Sacerdote, 2000, p. 3). It appears that, at the very least, black lives matter less than white lives.
It is very difficult for us, in our position of privilege, to understand what it means to be black in today's America. Some have made the effort to find out. Presbyterian minister Greg Allen-Pickett recently donned his clerical collar while riding the train to the church where he works in Atlanta, and asked the mostly black people around him how they were doing. People are comfortable talking with someone in a clerical collar (something slightly disturbing having recently seen the film Spotlight). He shares the responses in his blog: Reflections on a train. During the Republic party convention, American Public Media's Marketplace has been examining the intersection of race, poverty, and economic mobility in a series on how the deck is stacked: The Other Cleveland. And the Atlantic Magazine recently ran a multi-part series discussing Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It's worth quoting part of Amazon's summary of this book:

Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

In my previous post, I explained the difference between good profiling--given a crime, determining what type of person is most likely to have committed it--and bad, often unconscious, profiling--given a type of person, determining how likely it is that he is a criminal. I also explained how easy it is, when most of the problems the police are called to deal with involve young black men, to overestimate the probability that a black man encountered at random is a threat. There are many unfortunate consequences of this. At one level, we end up incarcerating black men at a disproportionate rate (as explained in Michelle Alexander's book). But that effect reinforces itself, as Todd Clear describes in his book Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantage Neighborhoods Worse. He explains how mass incarceration of the men (and women) from black communities has the unintended consequence of "widening racial disparities" and contributing to "the very social problems it is intended solve: it breaks up family and social networks, deprives siblings, spouses, and parents of emotional and financial support, and threatens the economic and political infrastructure of already struggling neighborhoods." (From the Amazon summary.)
Prominent black citizens have also been trying to explain to us what it is like to be black in American Society. U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican senator, delivered a floor speech about his experiences with police racial profiling. In one year, he--a U.S. senator--was stopped seven times by the police. By comparison, I've been stopped once in my lifetime. He describes how one of his staffers finally gave up trying to drive a nice car because he was so often stopped by police.
And then there have been the recent cases of black men being shot, often killed, by the police. There has been outrage expressed over unarmed black men killed by police, and most, recently two cases involving armed black men--Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. The latter had a concealed carry permit. The appearance presented is that the second amendment actually reads "...  the right of the white people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". At least in these cases there is significant investigation happening into the circumstances around the shootings. And there will continue to be controversies over the details, such as just how Castile informed the officer about his legally-carried fire-arm. But, unfortunately, had Castile been white, this would have turned into a routine traffic stop. With nobody dead. We frequently exclaim "if they would just follow police instructions, nothing bad would happen." A recent shooting in Miami appears to call even that claim into question.
It may appear that I am criticizing the police force, claiming that all policemen are racist. That is not the case. (Although another case came to light today where a police officer states that "99% of the time ... it is the black community being violent ... That's why a lot of white people are afraid. And I don't blame them.") I am criticizing us: American society. The position of the black person in our society is so ingrained in us, we don't even realize it. I have written about this before, in the entry titled Won't You Be My Neighbour. The only way for us to overcome it is to address it directly. This is why the phrase "all lives matter," proposed as a "better" saying than "black lives matter" misses the point. It tries to claim that it shouldn't matter whether a person is black or white, their life matters. But it allows us to get away with not facing our prejudice, not admitting that for now, to us, black lives really don't matter that much.
What about "blue lives matter"? Recently, in Dallas and in Baton Rouge, lone black men have purposefully assassinated police officers, particularly white police officers. The ever-provocative author and columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in a recent Atlantic Magazine article that this was almost inevitable given the distrust that has grown between the police and black communities. I don't want to think that this was inevitable, and I definitely don't think that it was in any way justified. And there is much more to discuss about motivations for the shooters--but I have to finish this entry, so I will leave that discussion to next time.
Here is the problem with "blue lives matter": Blue lives have always mattered. Any time a police officer has been killed in the line of duty, we are appalled and outraged. The crime is immediately investigated, with every resource available. And when the shooter is caught and tried, there is no doubt that he will be convicted and heavily sentenced. And while it is always deplorable when a police officer is killed, we must remember that people have a choice whether or not become a police officer. The black man has no choice whether or not to be black.
And then there is how we treat Muslims in this country. I won't go into details here. But I want you to think about this. The way we think about Muslims today very much parallels the way first century Jews thought about the Samaritans. Now read Luke 10:25-37 substituting Muslim for Samaritan, and Evangelical for Levite.

Alright Already! We Have a Justice Problem. What's the Solution?

We are entering the end game of the most divisive election season in history. Rarely have I seen so much hatred vomited by otherwise reasonable people; many of them my friends; many of them devout Christians. Sometimes I despair. I have had to stop following the posts of several friends on Facebook because the irrational vitriolic loathing is too intense for me.

And in this election system, some are calling for Law and Order. They say we need to re-establish peace before we begin discussing rectifying the injustice in our society. There is a major problem with this philosophy. It says that we will start addressing the lack of justice once those whom we have oppressed recognize the validity of their oppression. Once they acknowledge that they had no right to be upset and apologize for being upset, then we will apologize for upsetting them.

There is a way out of this crisis. Jeremiah has told us in the passage (7:5-7) we have already read: "If you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place." And at the end of the passage in Mark we have been reading, Jesus tells us (Mark 11:25): "Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses."

We must amend our ways and doings; not contingent on the other guy amending his ways first. Jesus and Jeremiah both tell us: be the first to say "sorry, I was wrong."
Do not oppress the alien--there's a command relevant to this election season!
Do not oppress the orphan and the widow, which is to say those who cannot provide for themselves.
Do not shed innocent blood. Enough has been said on this already.

Do not go after other gods to your own hurt.What are our modern-day Baals? Profit. Status. Power.

Frequently when I suggest that God directs us to provide for the poor, I get the response that this is a requirement levied on us individually, it is not the responsibility of the government to provide for the poor. Thus taxes collected to provide for the common welfare represent theft from hard-working individuals. It amazes me how hard we work to manipulate things to fit our world view. If the contention is that God has not forgotten about America, but America has forgotten about God, then it is imperative for America, as represented by our government of the people, by the people, for the people, to carry out God's command to care for those who cannot provide for themselves--the widows and orphans of today. We got rid of the government of kings, dynasties who taxed their subjects to add to their own wealth--a criticism Jesus is levying against the Temple authorities in the sections we have been studying. We have, in theory, a government whose purpose is to protect us and carry out our will for the benefit of all.

The role of the police

How does the government protect us? In addition to the national government providing the military, protecting us from external threats, local governments provide the police to protect us from ourselves, and to play a part in bringing justice. But apparently at times it becomes difficult to remember that the communities in which the police patrol are the very communities they are there to protect. When we start thinking of parts of our cities as war zones, and militarizing the police to be able to patrol those areas and engage the enemy, then we have forgotten our purpose. We have to stop thinking of the very people we should be protecting as the enemy.
This is not as difficult as it seems. In Wichita, the new police chief decided to respond to the announcement of a Black Lives Matter protest in a novel way. He suggested to the organizers that instead of a protest, the police department should host a cookout and meet directly with the protesters, giving each side the opportunity to interact with the other side in a non-threatening, personifying manner. This was brilliant. This directly counteracts the situation that creates in law enforcement the unconscious view that a black person is a threat, because most of the black people with whom they interact are criminals (see the lemma again). At the cookout, each side could begin to see the other side for what they truly are: people on opposite sides of the badge but with common goals: peace, civility, respect, justice.

Improbability calculation complete

And now for the final coincidence. In church today, the credo included a paraphrase of the verse from Amos:

But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Amos 5:24, New International Version

 This passage was made famous by Martin Luther King in his I have a dream speech:

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

 And when that happens, God will remember America--by a happy coincidence.