The OTHER Genesis Creation Account -or- Why The Creation Doesn't Really Matter

It's generally accepted there are two creation accounts in Genesis, the beautiful poetry of Genesis 1 and then the very earthy expulsion from the Garden that is Genesis 2 and 3. I think there are a couple of "re-creation" accounts -- Genesis 6-9 comes to mind -- but the creation is central to a lot of theologies because they come at the front of the book, so they are what people tend to read first (and focus on, to the exclusion of a lot of the rest of the narrative).

And our theological thinking tends to be geared toward beginning with creation. It makes logical sense to us. After all, God created everything, and if God started there, than we probably ought to as well.

I believe such an approach, however, gives undue attention to God's act creation. It puts the act of creating central and our human place in creation -- our participation in creating, organizing and arranging the world. A place I'm not sure Israel gave it. In fact, I suspect creation was something of an afterthought for Israel.

The third creation account supports this, I think. It's a short account, the first two verses of Genesis 5, and they go like this:

(1) This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.  (2) Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man [אדם] when they were created. (ESV)

or

(1) This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him;  (2) male and female created He them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. (JPS Tanakh, which is a much more literal rendering of the Hebrew)

or, if you must have the Hebrew (from the JPS Tanakh)

זֶ֣ה סֵ֔פֶר תּוֹלְדֹ֖ת אָדָ֑ם בְּי֗וֹם בְּרֹ֤א אֱלֹהִים֙ אָדָ֔ם בִּדְמ֥וּת אֱלֹהִ֖ים עָשָׂ֥ה אֹתֽוֹ ׃  זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בְּרָאָ֑ם וַיְבָ֣רֶךְ אֹתָ֗ם וַיִּקְרָ֤א אֶת ־שְׁמָם֙ אָדָ֔ם בְּי֖וֹם הִבָּֽרְאָֽם ׃ ס

After that, the chapter launches into a lengthy genealogy of the generations from Adam, through Seth, to Noah. Along the way, we meet the longest-lived characters in scripture, most of whom are just names. There's Methuselah, who lives nearly 1,000 years, and his father Enoch, who apparently never died (since everyone else named in this genealogy is noted to have died). He just disappeared after living a paltry 365 years (that itself is an interesting number). "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." (Gen. 5:24, ESV)

Now, this could simply be a reiteration of Genesis 1-3, as it hits the most important details. But this feels like the start of the book to me, possibly the original start of another document or set of tales. So, instead of repeating the essential details of the first three chapters of Genesis, these two short verses could be the original "creation" text upon which the first three chapters of Genesis expand.

In fact, as I read through Genesis 5 and the first part of Genesis 6, Genesis 6:1-8 feels like an insert (or two, since they mix God אלהים and Lord יהוה in an awkward way, and in this portion of the Bible (the Noah story especially), the switching between God and Lord seems to be indicative of edits. At any rate, the story feels like it ought to naturally flow from 5:32 straight to 6:9. Whoever might have been the original authors/editors of this material was not so much concerned with detailed causes of things. It is enough that God created Adam male and female in his image, blessed them and named them, just as it is enough that "the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence." (Gen. 6:11) This explanation is expanded upon at the beginning of Genesis 6, which adds lust to the picture -- the lust of the mysterious "sons of God" (בני–אלהים), and a race of giants, "the men of renown" whose names we never actually learn (because they don't matter, as the world is about to be flooded an all life on it annihilated).

Where was I? Right, creation. The short creation account of Genesis 5 -- if it is the start of an account -- suggests how unimportant the act of creation was. It can be dealt with quickly, in a few words, and merits no real explanation. It doesn't need it. The creation is a given, something that can be assumed, an fairly unimportant theologically. The narrative of the first 11 chapters of Genesis goes in fits and starts anyway, and is not particularly complete, focused, or comprehensive until Genesis 12, where the real action -- the call of Abraham -- begins.

It is at Genesis 12 that this story evolves from an account of why things are the way they are (a series of fall stories, from the fall of humanity -- Genesis 2-4 -- to the judgement on universal empire -- Genesis 11 -- to the toleration of evil in the world, as I have written about before) to an actual narrative about a specific people. The Bible moves from being a universal account, and one that appears to be cobbled together in places (pay close attention to the Noah story), to a specific account of a people -- us -- in the call of God to Abraham.

This call, this very specific revelation of God to Abraham, is what's really important theologically. This, and not the creation of the world, is where the story of Israel -- and the church -- really starts. Because we aren't a people created, but a people called.

I suspect this troublesome for us, because our theologies are all so creation centered. Even our confessions of faith -- "I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth" -- begin with creation. But what matters is not the created order of the world -- which has been corrupted by sin anyway -- but the call to be a very specific people in the world. What matters are the promises of God to the people God has called. And later God's redemption of the people God has called.

This may seem like hair-splitting, but we worship not the God of all creation, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The former is a serene majesty, an almost abstract one, who says "be" and it is, who divides the waters and the land and sees that it is all "good" (טוב). The latter gets down and dirty in the mess of the world, in the mess that is the called-out people.

We tell the story not of a created world, but of a redeemed world.

As I consider it, while our trinitarian creeds begin with creation, they spend very little time there. We affirm a creator God, but we really need to explain the second person -- Christ, the anointed one, the redeemer. Mostly because we argued over who Jesus was and exactly how he was all those things. But this also focuses our theological thinking, or at least it should, on the redemption, rather than the creation. On our specific calling and encounter with God, the things that make us a particular people, rather than some set of general principles we think God built into the world.

There are probably other implications for a theology that focuses on redemption rather than creation, but I'm going to let this sit for a bit and percolate. And see what happens with it.

Sometimes, The Work of God Means Doing Nothing

Here is my sermon for Sunday, 20 July. The Gospel reading, according to the revised common lectionary, was Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43:

(24) [Jesus] put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, (25) but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. (26) So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. (27) And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ (28) He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ (29) But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. (30) Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
...
(36) Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” (37) He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. (38) The field is the world, and the good seed is the children of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, (39) and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. (40) Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. (41) The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, (42) and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (43) Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.

* * *

There are days when, as a preacher, you find yourself looking at scripture and going -- well, this one's easy for me. Jesus does all of the hard work of interpretation here. There's nothing to do. Really, there isn't. I'm not exactly sure why you are all paying me for this. I'd dismiss you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, except that would make for a short worship service.

And there's the matter of the Lord's Supper, which we still have to share. So, sit tight. No one goes home early today. Sorry.

So, I have to come up with something. On the face of this, Jesus explains just about everything you might need explained in this parable, and does so in some amazing language. We have the field that is the whole, wide world, we have the seed -- the seed which only a few verses earlier in this chapter was the Word preached to an eager world -- which is now "the children of the kingdom," sown widely in soil that will allow them to grow and bear much fruit! But in the midst of all this, as the good seed grows to bear good fruit, the evil one plants his own seed, scatters his own children, amidst the good seed. A harvest is coming, when the angels of the Lord will gather it all together, the wheat and weeds, the children on the kingdom and the children of the evil one, and the weeds will be set aside and cast into the fire!

In fact, all of the causes of sin, all those who break the law of God, will be gathered together and cast into the fire, into the furnace. Sin is done for! This is good news! He who has ears, let him hear!

It seems so easy, so clear, on the face of it, this parable. Truly. Jesus does such a good job of explaining the gospel passage I'm not sure what's left.

Well, actually, there's something. Maybe you noticed it.

My grandfather owned a large farm and ranch in Eastern Washington, about 3,500 acres, most of it scrubland pasture where he and his brother grazed beef cattle. Grampie had about 800 acres under cultivation, wheat and barley. And some alfalfa. Up until I graduated from high school, my family would visit the ranch every other year, and some years, I'd go and visit by myself. When I was teenager, I actually got to work. At harvest time. My first harvest season, my job was to grease the combine every morning. Grampie was incredibly patient and kind as he showed me every little point -- every little zerk, to be technical about it -- I had to hit with the grease gun each morning before Grampie, or Uncle Mike, or one of Mike's sons would hop on the combine and cut a swath across the rolling hills that made up most of Grampie's fields of grain.

The second summer, I got to actually drive a grain truck, a big blue International Harvester from 1952. Which was something I will never forget.

Grampie and Grammie, however, never let me work much. They were insistent that I never acquire a taste for farm work. I was always too good to be a farmer, Grammie was insistent about that. So, my work was just a taste, a sip, a bare touch. It wasn't real work.

But they had hired hands, and they worked hard. In fact, the one summer I remember there being lots of hired hands, I only recall really seeing them at meal time. They were so busy, and always out in the fields. Working.

Have you caught it yet? There's a man, the owner of a farm, who sows seeds. He has men who work for him, servants, slaves -- and what do they do? They sleep when at least some of them should be watching. They tattle to their master, and are somewhat clueless when they do -- "Didn't you plant good seed? Don't you know your field is full of weeds too? How come?" And as the master assures them this was done on purpose, while they slept, they offer to go rip the growing weeds out, only to be told, "no, let's wait until the harvest."

"Let's wait ... until the harvest."

So, when it comes to that private moment when Jesus explains the parable to his disciples, he hits every point and person in the parable ... except for the slaves. They aren't there. The very people who do most of the talking in his parable, who sleep and wonder and demand to do some work aren't actually there.

These servants, these slaves, they do not sow, they do not reap, they sleep when they should watch.

I know if Grampie had such hired men, he wouldn't have kept them on long.

Note that the kingdom of heaven here is, like it is in most of Matthew's parables, not a thing, but a process. It is not a noun, but it is a verb. Here, it is sowing, sleeping, questioning, wanting, waiting, and eventually, reaping, threshing, burning and storing. This whole process is the kingdom, which means the evil one coming on sowing the weeds isn't somehow contrary to the kingdom of heaven, it is an intricate part of the kingdom. You don't have the kingdom without it.

You don't have the kingdom of heaven without the devil. Consider that!

This kingdom, where wheat and weed grow together, still waits for the harvest, to be set free, to see the glory of the sons of God.

And that means we don't get to stand here in the midst of the field, as servants of the master, and demand to pull weeds. That's not ours to do. Not our calling. Not our work. If we are the wheat, then our job is solely to grow and bear fruit, and toe wait for the harvest. Which is not a hard job, if you think about it, since a kernel of wheat or barley is programmed to grow. If the soil is good, if there's enough rain and ample sunshine, that little seed cannot help but grow tall and bear fruit.

Bearing fruit is easy in this parable. Think about that for a minute. Watered at the baptismal font, tended at the Lord's table, we almost have to work at not bearing fruit.

Now, if we consider ourselves the servants, well, our job is even easier. We do nothing. We sleep. We question. But it feels harder because like good slaves, we want to earn our keep. We want to work. We have hands that itch to dig and grasp and pull, souls that ache to do useful work and be satisfied with that work. That's what we were created for! After all, God created the man and placed him in the Garden in order to tend and care for it.

So this job as servants requires we actually fight our natures -- our desire to do something, to pull weeds, to do that work which has been reserved for someone else at a later date. And I know it offends us, seeing weeds among the wheat, when we know that good, straight rows of grain ripening in the warm sun are so much nicer looking. We so much ache to make this kingdom of heaven ours, something we have shaped and tended and played some part in bringing into being. To have it be a kingdom without the evil one.

Instead, we are to do nothing.

Because none of this work -- none of the planting, none of the growing, none of the watching, none of the reaping, none of the threshing -- none of it is ours. It is not our work to do. Our hands, which are many and which fidget at the very possibility of doing God's work, are to remain clean, unstained with dirt and the green of weeds -- and whatever wheat we may pull out as well.

Sometimes faithfulness to God means we do nothing. We just sit. And wait. It's hard, isn't it?

Remember God's great saving acts in scripture. When God saves Israel from Slavery in Egypt, all God asks of Israel is to prepare, to get ready. And to wait. When Israel faced the deep blue sea in front of it and a charging Egyptian army coming fast behind it, an army bent on murder, God speak through Moses and tells Israel: "Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent."

It's the same saving work God does for God's people at Jericho, when the walls of the city fell to the blast of a trumpet, or when God delivered the Canaanites to Deborah and Barak, or whittled Gideon's huge army of of more than 30,000 down to a mere 300 lest Israel boast that its own hands have saved them. It's the same saving work God does for Judah during the time of King Jehoshaphat, when God tells the people, "Do not be afraid, and do not be dismayed at this great horde, for the battle is not yours but God's."

Stand firm, God says, and see the salvation of the Lord on your behalf.

It's exactly what happens on Good Friday, that terrible day in which Jesus was crucified, in which sin and death at put to flight, routed, defeated. At best, we are spectators, merely watching as Jesus is humiliated, tortured, compelled to carry the very cross he is nailed to, raised up and then run through with a spear. At worst, we have betrayed him, taken joy in his humiliation, mocked him upon that cross, even taken whip and hammer in hand to draw blood and pound nails. Or the following Sunday, when all we can do is gawk at an empty tomb and wonder what it means, even when we meet the risen Jesus face to face. Remember, Jesus came to redeem, to call as followers, we who betrayed him, who abandoned him, who murdered him.

Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. See the salvation of the Lord on your behalf.

We didn't do that work. We cannot do that work. Because remember, if we cannot pull the weeds and consign them to the fire, we also are not commanded to harvest the good grain. That all belongs to the angels. We don't do anything in this relationship. We are the slaves who sleep. Who notice. But we have no actual role. It happens without us.

But we know the work of salvation is done. Sisters and brothers, we know that it is done! Jesus does it! I cannot honestly tell you what that really means -- because we still suffer, we still grow old, get sick, we die -- but somehow I know that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all of the suffering we experience, all of it is worthless, and death, which looms so darkly as the final word which answers all questions and solves all problems, is overcome and has no power. I don't know what it means, I cannot explain it, but I know it's true, I have lived in it, and so I wait in patience, trusting in God.

That's us, brothers and sisters, the people who wait patiently while others do the work. Knowing that the world is in the process of being remade, not by us, not by our hands, but by the Grace and mercy of God. The Grace and mercy of God.

Who the Strong Become When They Act Without Mercy

I don't talk much about Israel and Palestine anymore. My sympathies are largely with the Palestinians, though I have made an effort to get to know a few Israelis, and I'm not sure the world needs me adding to the hot air on the subject.

But there's something missing about the current discussion (which really isn't, as it's more awn argument in which each side tries to justify itself and demonize the other). The Israelis and their sympathizers speak a great deal about the care and precision with which strikes are made against Gaza, and technically I suppose this is true (just as it likely is when American forces drop bombs somewhere), but I'm more interested in a moral dimension of the discussion: who do the powerful and wealthy become when they war they wage is done against a poor, badly armed and largely captive population?

Who do the strong become when just about all the war they wage is done against people who cannot effectively fight back?

This isn't a criticism aimed entirely at Israel either -- Americans largely wage war against peoples and nations incapable of effectively resisting, much less fighting back. I'm thinking Iraq, which by the 2003 Anglo-American invasion had pretty well been beaten and starved into submission. (That said, the Iraqis later more-or-less defeated the United States in the only war they could effectively fight.) But the Israelis have become masters at this, and the term "mowing the grass" was coined for these brutal and incredibly destructive, but brief and largely pointless, forays into Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon -- as if they were simply onerous chores that got one sweaty and dirty, and not the cause of significant death and suffering.

It's part of a larger language, a set of ideas, in which the powerful no longer have responsibilities and obligations to the weak. In which captors have no obligations to their captives. With Israel and Palestine, the "peace process" has helped foster the illusion -- and it is an illusion -- that there is no occupation in the West Bank, that Israel has cordoned off Gaza and turned it into a giant, open-air prison camp. But it's bigger than that. It's in the revolt of aggrieved billionaires, of Republicans who complain about the "47 percent of takers," when Secretary of State Madeline Albright disgustingly noted that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children "was worth it" when it came to containing the post-Kuwait War Iraqi state.

In this world, a kind-of junk Randianism* pervades -- the powerful and rich have no obligations to the weak and poor. No responsibilities. In fact, if anything, the powerful and rich are constant victims of the weak and poor, and are entitled to defend themselves using every murderous tool at their disposal.  The weak and the poor have all the responsibilities here, to stop being a burden, to stop "taking," to cease their resistance, stop being an annoyance, possibly even to die, because their very existence is a problem in need of a solution. (And one in which they will have no role nor even be asked.) They are an eyesore, an annoyance, human beings whose well-being is of no concern, whose suffering only has amusement value.

And the rich have plenty of means to avenge their "victimhood," on account of being rich. If the Palestinians suffer, it is because they resist, because somehow, unguided, home-made rockets fueled by sugar-water are somehow the moral equivalent of fleets of F-15 and F-16 fighter jets armed with precision guided bombs. If the Iraqis suffered, well, it was because of their government. "Double war crimes," Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said. 

It's your fault I'm making you suffer. That's the morality at work here.

Now, it may be there never was a world in which obligations and responsibilities figured highly. But there was a time of noblesse oblige, in which at least the idea that those with much owed something to those with little. The welfare state, such as it is, dates from that time, and the post-WWII world was built by people deeply possessed of a sense of obligation and responsibility. The Israelis began their obligation of Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai in 1967 with some sense that theirs would be a "humane occupation," one informed by several generations of Jewish humanism and the Jews' own experience as a dispossessed people. It didn't really work out that way, largely because there can never be a liberal, humane or humanitarian way to govern people against their will. 

In this, the powerful and wealthy become brutes, and slowly (but surely) become acclimated to imposing sacrifice and suffering upon others. To becoming mass murderers. To keeping people in cages, taunting them, beating them, starving them, and then wondering why they occasionally lash out. Americans, like Israelis, have become accustomed to seeing themselves as victims, or potential victims, and in the world in which we live, victims are no bound by any morality when they "defend themselves," when they seek to right a wrong or prevent a further wrong. There is no limit to the violence that can be inflicted, to the suffering that can be imposed, to the guilt that can be presumed. Victims owe their victimizers no mercy. It's as if the language of Frantz Fanon had been stood on its head and made to serve not revolutionaries seeking to throw off colonial masters but rather the most powerful states - and their armies - in the world

If anything, this is the ultimate identity politics. Race, gender, sexual orientation have nothing on the victimhood claimed by the frightened and aggrieved rulers of wealthy, powerful, and paranoid states.

Nor will this change any time soon. Democrats may talk the language of obligation, but they aren't actually very good at doing it, and the only obligations and responsibilities in the liberal/progressive lexicon that matter all get channeled through the centralized state. Because it's the only thing we have in common. (They also want to preserve the very state power that brutalizes and destroys.) There are intellectual conservatives in the Anglo-American world who talk seriously about obligations and responsibilities, but they are few (and not terribly influential right now), and the Republican party (and the conservative movement) are hopeless on the matter, talking an angry language of rights that denies any notion that we owe something to our neighbors merely for being our neighbors.

But this is the world we live in now. There is no way to restore a sense of obligation, not on those who govern, not on those with wealth, not on nations that keep others captive, that patrol the world with weapons ready to annihilate all who disturb their sense of good order. So, we shall see more of this. Not less.

# # #

* Not that Randianism isn't already junk to begin with.

On Laments, and the Bashing of Infants on Rocks

The folks over at the blog P.OST: AN EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY FOR THE AGE TO COME (it's a fascinating blog I read frequently, and it's sharpened my understanding of how I read scripture) have an interesting take on Psalm 137, which begins as a lament in exile and ends as, well, as a wish for mass murder...

(1) By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
(2) On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
(3) For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
(4) How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land?
(5) If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!
(6) Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!
(7) Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”
(8) O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us!
(9) Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!

That last line is troublesome to many. What to make of such an aspiration, such a desire? (I wrote a song based on this psalm, and wanted very much to incorporate that last line, but the song wouldn't let me, as much as I tried.) For the folks at P.OST, while the psalm is part of "our story" as Israel/church, we don't "have the right" to misinterpret this verse by somehow assuming it belongs specifically to us, or speaks to our time and our circumstances:

We don’t have to suppose that these are our sacred texts. There is nothing wrong with rejecting the psalm as a “lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel”. The Bible means what it meant and speaks to us on that basis. That is not a bad thing. It is a good thing.

Fine. I guess I can agree with this, so far as it goes. This particular psalm is the product of a time and place, and speaks to a circumstance -- life in exile along to Euphrates River, serving the very people who drug you into exile -- that is not ours. So, the sentiment at the end doesn't have to be ours either.

Except... There have been times in my life, like the circumstances surrounding the end of my first internship while at seminary, that left my feeling very angry, very alone, very abandoned. It was that very experience that gave me the ability to see in scripture something of the story of my life, and the story of the church (I have sketched an outline for a book that compares the fate of the church today in the face of modernity and enlightenment to conquest by Assyrians and Babylonians, and that we face another exile, on the banks of rivers of Babylon, serving and entertaining cruel masters who have destroyed our cities and carried us off). How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land, especially to people who demand we sing for their amusement?

These are human feelings, feelings that are no strangers to us even as God's people. As is the desire for vengeance, to see the pain and suffering of those who have inflicted such on us. And it's okay to have them. To speak them. To even give them up to God in prayer. Anger as well as sadness and despair is one of the marks of lament.

Note, however, what the psalm does not say or do. It proclaims a judgment upon Babylon, and calls down blessing upon those who will destroy it. Who will murder its children. It is confident in that judgement. The one making the lament does not seek God's approval to go and himself (I'm assuming here) inflict vengeance upon the Babylonians, and their descendants. It does not agitate, or organize, or demand. It does not call for war or liberation. It's not the call of the powerful with a state, an army, and an arsenal. It's not Genesis 34. This is the cry of the powerless, the conquered, the scattered, and it is assumed in the passage that the vengeance coming upon doomed Babylon and its daughters will be done by someone else.

It will be God's vengeance. Not Israel's. Not ours.

The vengeance of God, in this instance, is a thing to be trusted in and waited upon. It invokes the primal saving act of God, the rescue of God's people Israel from slavery in Egypt, from that horrible moment when Israel believed itself done, ready to be overrun, trapped between the sea and Pharaoh's rapidly advancing army:

Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again.  The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.

This may not be pleasant thing to hear, and it may shock our modern (or post-axial) sensibilities to hear one of God's people invoking God's blessing upon horrific violence. But Psalm 137 gives us space, not just to lament in sorrow, but also in rage, and even to express our desire for murderous retribution. It is okay to want these things.

At the same time, the passage is coherent with the rest of God's saving action for Israel, and Israel's understanding of the ways its God has redeemed it time and again -- through miraculous acts that demand Israel's patience and it's inaction. This is still true, and because of that, we can read this psalm without simply or solely discarding it. However, it's not okay to do violence because our vindication, our vengeance, our redemption belongs to God and to God alone. Who will fight for us. We have only to be silent, and to wait.

The People of God is NOT Us

Hobby Lobby has a cute little God-n-Country advert, something it has apparently taken out in newspapers across the country since 1997, extolling the virtues of a patriotic faith. Which they are, of course, free and entitled to do.

Regular readers here -- assuming there are any -- will know that I am not a fan of "God and Country" Christianity, since it tends to put country first (with God somewhere behind in a supporting role). Or, worse, it confuses the two, not knowing quite where God (or the Church, the people God) stops and country starts. This isn't so much Christianity as it is a civil religion, a mishmash of Enlightenment nationalism and the popular protestantism of America's founding, a swirling concoction of Scottish and English Calvinism, the rigors of Methodism, and the fervor of the Baptists. I will leave the genealogy for another day, however.

The Hobby Lobby advert begins with a quote from Pslams:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD. (Psalm 33:12)

This isn't the whole verse, which is actually:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage! (33:12, ESV)

Which is Hebrew, reads thusly:

אַשְׁרֵ֣י הַ֭גּוֹי אֲשֶׁר ־יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהָ֑יו הָעָ֓ם בָּחַ֖ר לְנַחֲלָ֣ה לֽוֹ

The word here translated as "nation" is גוי goy,  which is almost always rendered as εθνος ethnos in Greek (when Jesus or Paul or any of the other NT speakers or writers refer to "the nations"), and in the Hebrew Bible it tends to mean those people who are not Israel. But not always. God promises Abraham in Genesis 12:2 that "I will make you a great nation" (וְאֶֽעֶשְׂךָ֙ לְג֣וֹי גָּד֔וֹל) a goy gidol. In Exodus 19:6, God speaks to Israel through Moses, telling the Israelites that "and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (וְג֣וֹי קָד֑וֹשׁ) a goy qodesh. So Israel, the People of God (usually refered to as an עם, which tends to mean a people related by kinship and a shared patrimony), can be a goy too.

Psalm 33 is a psalm of thanksgiving and praise, marking God as just (vv. 4-5), creator (vv. 6-9), then finally the redeemer of Israel (vv.10-19), finishing with a proclamation that because the LORD is good, we who are the people saved and redeemed by the LORD, will wait with patience, gladness and hope (vv. 20-22).

An interesting aside, the passage praising God for being Israel's redeemer contains very a scriptural condemnation of sophisticated and powerful armies, and that true salvation always lies with the LORD:

The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior not delivered by his great strength.
The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue. (vv. 16-17)

I think Hobby Lobby in quoting the first part of v. 12, is trying to make a fairly simple statement -- that America is blessed because The LORD is our God. Or at least the God of real, faithful, proper Americans.

The problem with this is the second part of the verse: the people for whom he has chosen as his heritage. This is a very specific reference, a reference to Israel, the people -- עם and/or גוי -- that God called into being with the promises of land, children and "being a blessing" to Abraham as he wandered. The people that God redeemed from slavery in Egypt, gave the teaching to at Sinai, rescued from oppression again and again during the time of Judges, promised a final redemption from exile in the lineage of David the King. God has chosen a people, it is Israel and the Church, the εκκλησια, the assembled people God brought together through baptism and calling in the person of Jesus Christ.

It is not the United States of America. I know many American Christians wish to believe that, at some point in our history, God inked a covenant with America, but I've seen nothing resembling proof that such covenant exists. Just mere assertions, and none of them hold the weight of scripture or revelation. The owners of Hobby Lobby may believe in such a covenant, the Americans are the people of God merely by being Americans (or they should be), and they are welcome to that faith. But that is not a Christian faith. Americans as Americans are not the people of God -- they are a גוי or an εθνος in the negative sense. A people who are other, who are not.

Americans, of course, can be part of the people of God. But their inclusion is the result of baptism or some other kind of calling, and not because they were born as Americans, had the right parents, came from the right kind of community, or believe the right things. American citizenship does not contain in it the promise of eternal life, or the Kingdom of God.

And the owners of Hobby Lobby may, if pushed, actually admit to that. But the advert, as it stands, it a testament to an idolatrous civic faith that tries to turn the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into the God of Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan, a God who always sides with state and blesses it unconditionally regardless of what it does.

Well, except when it legalizes abortion, allows homosexuals to get legally married, and demands companies provide birth control for their employees.

Free to be Bourgeois

Just finished reading Steven Hahn's review of David Brion Davis' The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation in the New Republic. I don't have the resources right now to buy books, but I have been reading as many long "think pieces" and booker reviews as I could find, and this one was fascinating.

There's a lot to comment about, but short of reading Davis' book, I won't do that right now. But something Hahn writes about as he considers Davis' reflections on the "failure" of emancipation to create "egalitarian and prosperous" societies (as slavery was ended in the British Empire, and across the Western Hemisphere):

Why was this? How could such a great triumph of “moral progress” end up with results so dismal that some could wonder if there had been any moral progress at all? In The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Davis offered some important clues. Abolitionism, he argued, had special appeal to members of a developing class of manufacturers and merchants who had simultaneously been touched by evangelicalism and come to depend on a growing class of free laborers for their livelihoods. Increasingly they viewed the “external” authority of slave masters as tyranny and sin, and the “internal” authority of individuals as the true basis of freedom and independence. The sin of slavery, as they saw it, resided in denying slaves the opportunities to establish a direct relationship with God, to form families, and to improve themselves in the ways that they chose, in denying them the personal dignity and integrity to which all humans were entitled. The sin in freedom resided in the rejection of those opportunities on the part of those who could choose.

Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, expressed this distinction with great power during a trip to Britain in 1846, when he dismissed any similarity between slave and wage labor, and thereby withdrew a hand of solidarity from the very working people who were supporting abolitionism. American slavery was unique, he maintained, not because of its greater physical abuse but because of its dehumanizing domination. Douglass understood the forms of personal and political power that would compromise emancipation when it came in the United States, and so he, together with radical members of the Republican Party, pressed for the extension of full civil and political rights to the freedpeople. But more than a few abolitionists, [William Lloyd] Garrison in particular, thought that their job was done when slavery was abolished, and they could be quick to blame the former slaves for failing to seize the opportunities that freedom appeared to provide.

What this suggests is that the freedom at stake, at least from the standpoint of most of the radical abolitionists, was to make good and moral choices, to engage in self-improvement and uplift. In short, to be pious bourgeois. Slavery's great sin was denying that choice, and even preventing it. But free men and women make the kinds of choices that lead to bourgeois piety of their own accord.

(This very American understanding of freedom would echo a century later, as preachers of the American civic faith would encourage support for the Second World War and then the Cold War by noting that while unfree people are compelled to sacrifice for the state, free men make that sacrifice willingly.)

This has become, I think, the moral template for viewing the purpose of freedom. Among conservatives, the ability to make good choices -- indeed, the right choice -- is not dependent on prior circumstances, experience, or mindset, but is merely an act of will. Free the will, and a truly free choice is possible. Thus, the responsibility for making bad choices rests solely on the person or persons making the choice. This is still the conservative mindset today, whether spoken elegantly or crudely. Those who are free in effect justify their freedom by making the "right" choices and living in the correct way.

If they make the wrong choices, they suffer the consequences for those choices, and have no business with special pleadings.

The American left does not get a pass on this, because bourgeois values and virtues are as central to American progressivism and liberalism as they are to American conservatism. And I think those differences focus on how one becomes bourgeois. Of course, anyone can choose, and many have. Conservatives, however, are more willing to exclude the non-bourgeois ("you choose to become one of us"), while progressives are more willing to extend special efforts to "educate" and inculcate the making of bourgeois choices ("you become one of us by being accepted by us"). It's a toss up, in my mind, which is less tolerant, since progressive "toleration" uses the tools of state and social power to compel bourgeois choices and stigmatize those who can't or don't by making them wards of the state, while the conservative version generally criminalizes and marginalizes.

In many ways, we live with the worst of both, in which a ferocious bourgeois piety seeks to brutalize all of those who, for whatever reason, fail to choose to be good, pious bourgeois.

The Lord of the Manor

I don't have much to say about Clipper's owner Donald Sterling. The taped conversation was supposed to be private and I do think there are places where even awful people should be able to speak reprehensible ideas without consequences. But it's already out there, and there is something that bothers me. A lot.

On the tape, he is alleged to have had the following exchange with his "girlfriend":

Stiviano: Do you know that you have a whole team that’s black, that plays for you? 

Sterling: Do I know? I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Do I know that I have—Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

No, Donald, you don't give them anything. Except their wages. You hired them for their skills and talents, and pay them accordingly.

I get angry when some very wealthy person, or corporate board member, or CEO, claims that hiring people is a "gift" and that wages are something we are "given" as if it were charity. As I recall the theory, and it's been a while, so I might be mistaken, individuals and companies hire people in the belief that the skills, talents, and experience will prove profitable for the employer. Certainly basketball has proven profitable for Donald Sterling, and I don't hear that he balks at having to pay the players he hires -- whose labor and skills he leases -- what amounts to the going rate in the National Basketball Association.

No, he doesn't give them anything except what the contract, a supposed free exchange, requires. And that's not a gift, that's compensation. Part of the exchange. For leasing their time and talents.

Sterling's notion of gift, however, is part of the whole idea of labor as unfree. It's the kind of attitude a slave master or a manor lord would have regarding slaves or serfs. "I give them..." As if it were right and fair that the serf's labor or the slave's work go uncompensated. That some people have the right to command or compel the labor of others. At least serfdom, however unfree labor might have been, came with a sense of obligation (imposed fairly rigorously by custom and culture), whether it was fully lived out of not. A master had rights and obligations to those he owned, and a master could be held to those obligations.

But the wealthy in the West have lost that sense of obligation toward the not-wealthy. Indeed, what thy rich in the capitalist world today evince is an overwhelming and overweening sense of victimhood and entitlement. And that can't foster any sense of obligation. Ideologically, the second half of the 20th century increasingly stripped away any notion that the wealthy have any obligations to those who are not. Those obligations are difficult to impose even in a culture that demands them, but impossible when the rich claim victimhood. That somehow, hiring people is a generous good deed (as opposed to a good way to make money) in and of itself for which the toiling masses, in fear of unemployment, should grovel and be grateful for.

And yes, I do think these things are related. "I support them and give them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses." This shows a contempt for the autonomy of his employees. It shows contempt for the very fact they are employees, who make their own decisions and choices with the money they are paid. Or does Sterling pay his players in food, clothes, cars, and houses?

I do not know if Sterling's attitude would be different if his players were white. Race does play some part in this -- Black labor has never been valued as much as white labor, and Black autonomy and humanity have also never had a high value. How much, though, I'm not sure. White skins didn't protect a lot of laborers from mistreatment and indignity.

But mostly, we just see a contempt for free labor here.

Baba Yaga, President of South Korea

Trolling the North Korean daily newspaper Rodong Shinmun today, I came across a three-part article, "We Accuse Park the Bitch," dedicated to Park Guen-hye, the current president of the Republic of Korea (the Korea south of the DMZ). I've had uncharitable thoughts about American presidents -- oh, George W. Bush comes to mind -- but not quite like this:

South Korea once had an idiot-president called Lee Myung Bak notorious for his misconduct and wickedness. People gave him a nickname a "man of 2MB", sneering at his low intellectual faculty.  

Also coming next to no one was former U.S. President Bush for his political ignorance. And now Park Geun Hye, a witch sister, has come forth far surpassing Bush in foolishness. 

During her recent trip to some countries, this ugly old maid let loose a strain of abuses at us. Lacking in her ability to think and judge in her own way, she just parroted what had been told by cowardly runaways and villains of her "National Intelligence Service". She has eyes, ears and mouth as good as any of us but she cannot judge what is right or wrong after seeing and hearing things, and her mouth never calls a spade a spade. She is not worth the name of a politician. She is a pumpkin, a witch full of hatred for her fellow countrymen.  

President as she is, she knows damn all. She is utterly ignorant of how the world is faring and how it is changing.  

They say she is well over her 60s, she is growing older and older only to be more wicked and more foolish.  

We warn you, old girl Park, to be a little prudent in your speech and action, or you will smart for it.  

-- Kim Hyok, student of Hamhung Teacher Training College No. 2

Apparently, during a trip to Holland and Germany, Park talked about Germany as a model for Korean reunification, a subject that drove North Korean commentators -- because there's no distinction between commentary and news in a North Korean newspaper -- nuts.

I'm curious as to exactly what kind of insult "pumpkin" is in Korean.