Electric Circuit Rider

The world’s economy appears to be falling apart for a variety of reasons that have converged on this particular moment in history. The metaphors in Mark’s gospel lesson for the first Sunday in Lent illustrate the reasons why the economy is falling apart:

Wilderness, in the Bible is always a symbol of a place where there are no maps and no rules. The deregulation of banks and other financial institutions and the apparent disinterest of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulating agencies in enforcing the rules remaining on the books, made Wall Street and other financial centers into a kind of Wild West, where, as the Bible would put it, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

In the Biblical wilderness, whether it was the nation of Israel crossing to the Promised Land or Jesus preparing for His ministry, people were tested to see if they had a spiritual compass that would keep them faithful to what was right. Apparently our government believed that bankers, accountants, CEO’s of large investment firms and other financial giants were saints who did not need to be accountable to anyone else in order to remain honest – and that they were geniuses who completely understood the new and radically different financial instruments that were being developed for investors.

Satan, in the Bible is always the Tempter, the one who shows up in the wilderness precisely when we are at our weakest and attempts to sell us power, glory or success for the price of our souls. Satan was at work, not simply on Bernie Madoff or those bankers and investment managers who blithely took bonuses for losing billions, but also on the 22-year-old who maxed out her credit card, the 80-year-old lady who mortgaged her house to buy herself some jewelry, the young couple who thought that, if they stretched themselves, they could afford the mortgage payments until they were able to “flip” their house for a profit, and a nation that figured that their grandchildren could pay the credit card bill they were running up to fight two wars and giving the rich tax cuts.

Wild Beasts, in the Bible are always devouring the unwary. They are not evil, they are just natural. They obey the laws of creation. The sudden decision on the part of millions to rein in their spending acts as a wild beast on the retail sector. The fact that millions of loans are coming due acts as a wild beast on the credit market. The hunger of the newly emerging economies of Asia and Latin America for natural resources like oil acts as a wild beast on commodities.

So, our human economy is falling apart. We hope that the application of Keynesian economics will rescue us, but there is a real possibility that this convergence of wilderness, Satan and wild beasts is something new in economic history and that it has become resistant to the old economic antibiotics.

And yet, the solution is “at hand”. Angels stand ready to minister to us, if only we will believe in God’s economy. The word “economy” may work better for us than “kingdom” in this age when even great national alliances like the G-8 are impotent against the economic forces that swirl around them and through them.

A recent book tells us that the first reaction of the world’s central banks to the Great Depression was to try to maintain the value of currency by making sure that it was backed by gold. This would bring stability to the falling markets, they reasoned. Yes, everyone needs stability, but it can’t be based on gold. It needs to include all the colors of the rainbow. The beginning of God’s economy is trusting in the promises of God. Even if the Dow falls below 5,000, it won’t be the end of the world.

We are told that Jesus was ministered to by angels in the wilderness. The next step in living in God’s economy is trusting in the grace of God who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the flowers of the field, so why would God not care for our needs as well?

Finally, the wild beasts may take a chunk or two out of us, but if we follow Jesus, if we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome strangers (like immigrants), the wild beasts will lick our hands.

These words of Jesus: “Turn, for the Economy of God is near” call us to see that the world doesn’t have to be run by Wall Street’s rules or Pennsylvania Avenue’s rules. The world can be run by the rules of the New Jerusalem where the streets are paved with gold, because next to love, gold is worth less than asphalt.

The religious are a greater mystery to the unreligious than the unreligious are to the religious. In a series of sermons that Karol Cardinal Wojtyla preached before he became Pope John Paul II, he pointed out that the most insightful document on atheism produced for Vatican II was written by cloistered monks. These men who devoted their entire lives to prayer had looked into their own hearts, he said, and they found the roots of all atheism.

Recently, I’ve been reading short essays by scientists, many of whom assert that it is intellectually dishonest to be both a scientist and to affirm religious faith. The thing that I find striking about these essays written by some very smart people is how clueless they seem to be about why people are religious.

In all fairness, they are quoting a lot of religious people when they say we are religious because our mothers were, or “we’ve just always believed”, or “if people don’t believe in God they will be immoral”. Actually, such folks aren’t very different from those who are honest enough to admit that they remain unconvinced that God exists. These “believers” are the ones most threatened by honest unbelievers and they are usually most responsible for persecuting “unbelievers”.

Most religious people that I know base their faith on experience. And they remain as untroubled by atheists as someone who has sailed around the world is undisturbed by the Flat Earth Society. The problem is that this experience is of another world – another order – that, in its own way makes this world, and especially the values of this world, seem insubstantial and unreal. Another problem is that these experiences, for most of us, are relatively short-lived. We have the sense that we could experience them more often, but there’s something about us that resists seeing Reality and prefers this world’s illusions instead. That’s why we understand atheists better than atheists understand us.

Paul describes this in the Epistle reading for Transfiguration Sunday. He speaks of “the god of this world” “veiling” the minds of unbelievers. This isn’t an insult. He knows this from personal experience as do you and I. We’ve had just enough experience with seeing Reality to know that most of the time we are wearing blinders.

The stories of Elijah being taken up into heaven and of the Transfiguration of Jesus are graphic ways of understanding how another world, another order, exists not “up there” in space or “out there” in the future, but “at hand”. As dramatic as these stories are, they are recognizable to the believer because, even if we have not encountered this other world as dramatically, we recognize the other world from our own experience, just as a devotee of old Woody Allen movies would recognize familiar scenes in New York City, even if he or she had never visited the place in person.

Our experiences may fall into three categories:

1. We see, hear or feel things that cannot have been caused by anything in our normal experiential world. Whether it is Thomas Merton standing on a street corner in Louisville, KY watching the divine light shine out of faces of passersby one afternoon, or John Wesley sitting in a little chapel in Aldersgate Street feeling his heart strangely warmed, or St. Francis hearing a voice saying, “rebuild my church”; people have real experiences that register, if not on their sensory organs, then on the receptors for sound, sight and touch in the brain that change their lives.
2. We experience answers to prayer. These, of course, may be dismissed as coincidences, but as William Temple famously said, “When I pray, coincidences happen; and when I don’t, they don’t.”
3. We experience the truth that the laws of this other world are superior to the laws of this world. Right now, for example, we are watching the collapse of an economic system that was built largely on laws that place self-interest ahead of the neighbor’s interest, that permit lies in the interest of generating sales and profits – or the appearance of profits, and that create scarcity for the many by creating abundance for the few. These laws create wealth and power in the short-term. However, they clearly lead to disaster. On the other hand, laws like “love your neighbor as yourself” and “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you” may place their practitioners at a disadvantage in the short-run, but, when disaster strikes, at least these folks have some friends to give them a hand.

 I suspect that there would be fewer unbelievers if there were more of us who testify to having had experiences 1 & 2 who would actually practice number 3.

This will be the shortest post I’ve ever put on here. Back in the 70’s, I heard some Homiletics prof call for  a moratorium on the institutional sermon. That’s the kind of sermon we preachers preach about issues within the church that seem so important to us but our parishioners don’t give two hoots about. I’ve managed to observe that moratorium for 30 years or so, with maybe half-a-dozen exceptions.
But I’d encourage you to look at a blog that raises what I think is THE institutional question for the UM Church:Is the United Methodist Church Like the Big 3?

I am a big fan of the Edge – a website that contains some of the most challenging thinking that I have found.

This week’s edition focuses on two things I care about and a couple of things I didn’t even really know existed.

One of the things I care about is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  And like just about everyone else who cares about that, I feel helpless and hopeless. How can these irreconcilable differences ever find a peaceful reconciliation?

It appears that it might not be impossible – theoretically. In the article, “How Words Could End a War”, Scott Atran (an Anthropologist) and Jeremy Ginges (a Psychologist) summarize their research with people on both sides of this terrible war. They offer “commonsense” solutions. For example, to Palestinians, “give up your claim to land in
Israel and accept $10 billion each year for 100 years from Western nations”, but the Palestinians are insulted by that kind of deal. However, if Israelis would apologize for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war, they might consider withdrawing some of their own demands. If Palestinians and their Arab allies would really guarantee Israel’s right to existence and rewrite their textbooks to reflect that commitment, Israelis would be willing to return to their pre-1967 borders.

Another thing I care about is science and religion. Clearly, I have a commitment to religion. I also have an undergraduate degree in experimental Psychology and really believe in the power of empirical research to advance human knowledge. On the Edge website you can find a debate raging among scientists around the question raised by Dr. Jerry Coyne, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the U. of Chicago.

In an article in the New Republic, Dr. Coyne asserts that Religion and Science are mutually incompatible. He asserts that even though a great many scientists are church-goers and a great many church-goers do not find Copernicus’ theory about the earth revolving around the sun, Darwin’s theory of Evolution, or Einstein’s theory of Relativity inimical to their faith; the truth is that they are just holding completely contradictory ideas in their mind the way a married man who is having an affair would say he believes both in marriage and in his love for his mistress.

I particularly appreciated this observation by Kenneth R. Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University:

Coyne’s entire critique, then, is based upon an unspoken assumption he expects his readers to share, namely, that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge. To Coyne, any deviation from that view is an adulterous contradiction of the sacred scientific vow to exclude any possibility of the spiritual, not just from one’s scientific work, but from the entirety of one’s philosophical world view.

With all due respect to my distinguished colleague, that is nonsense. One can indeed embrace science in every respect, and still ask a deeper question, one in which Coyne seems to have no interest. Why does science work? Why is the world around us organized in a way that makes itself accessible to our powers of logic and intellect? The true vow of a scientist is to practice honest and open empiricism in every aspect of his scientific work. That vow does not preclude the scientist from stepping back, acknowledging the limitations of scientific knowledge, and asking the deeper questions of why we are here, and if existence has a purpose. Those questions are genuine and important, even if they are not scientific ones, and I believe they are worth answering.

Last week, we looked at the kind of demons who go to church. This week, Jesus drives out even more demons. The scene, in the gospel for this coming Sunday, in which Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law and then spends half the night healing the sick and casting out demons, was, I think, powerfully portrayed in the stage version of Jesus Christ, Superstar. In one scene, the lights from the front of the stage go out and there is just a backlit silhouette showing hands raised in supplication to Jesus and he is responding as fast and furiously as he can.

Tonight, all over the world, people are crying out to Jesus and he is answering their prayers. In hospitals and homes, mothers are praying for their sick children and the sick themselves are crying out in fear and pain for Jesus to heal them. But in an even deeper darkness, men and women saddled with addictions or suffering from violent rage or deep depression are crying out to Jesus to be saved from the demons that are destroying their lives.

These prayers are moments of clarity in an all-enveloping madness. When even your  will is enslaved by a desire to hurt yourself or someone else, it’s a real miracle to be able to pray for deliverance. The demons themselves often control the prayers of the people they inhabit and they pray, as the one in last week’s gospel prayed, not to be destroyed. But there will come a day when the human race will not only be delivered from the outward violence of man and nature, from wars and famines, earthquakes and conflicts, but also from inner storms and psychic desires for some form of slow suicide. 
 We see the early signs of that day’s coming when we see people who once were lost in a nightmare of drugs, abuse, hatred, or self-destruction who now meet in church basements around a coffee maker and a card table telling each other how many hours, days, weeks, months and years it has been since they had their last drink, smoked their last joint, turned their last trick, hit their last child, gambled away their last dollar.

And they all trace those transformations to a cry for help uttered to some “higher power” who had mercy on them and restored them to sanity.

Sure, it doesn’t always take place in a 12-Step group and some of the demons aren’t named “Rum” or “crack” or “the Lottery” – they may not even have names, but people who have had those demons don’t read these passages as mere artifacts of an ancient and more superstitious time.

When the Bible says, “he cast out many demons”, it is talking about people you know.