Unpacking a Beastly Metaphor
Genesis 41:1-13; Mark 13:14-23
Epiphany 3 (series)
January 26, 2014
Epiphany 3 (series)
January 26, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Do you accept the
freedom and power that God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in
whatever forms they present themselves?
This was one of your
baptismal promises. Someone made this
promise on your behalf if you were baptized as an infant. You made it for yourself if you were baptized
as a young person or adult. You affirmed
this promise if you were confirmed. So
it’s never a wrong thing to reaffirm this promise. So I put it to you once again (And remember
that the answer to a question that begins with “Do you?” is “I do” or “I don’t”):
Do you accept the freedom and power that God gives you to resist evil,
injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?
I do.
That freedom and
power are a privilege and a duty that we embrace as followers of Jesus. The tricky part of the promise, though, is
found in the words “in whatever forms they present themselves.”
It would be great if
“evil, injustice, and oppression” were obvious.
But they aren’t. Cartoon
characters might wake up one morning, stretch, yawn and say, “What a beautiful
morning! I think I’ll do something evil
and unjust today.” But real people don’t
do that.
Take Bashar
al-Assad, for example. He is in the news
a lot these days. He is the embattled
President of Syria. There is evidence
that he has been involved in the use of chemical weapons against his own
citizens. By common international
consent the use of these weapons is illegal and immoral. And to use them against civilians makes it
even worse. And to use them against his
own people is worse still. But I doubt
that he gets to his office in the morning and says to his aide, “Draw up some
plans for something really oppressive. I’m
feeling especially evil today.”
I don’t know
President Assad, but I’ll bet that he believes that he is acting in the best
interests of Syria and that the destruction and death that the civil war has
let loose pain him deeply. But I’ll bet that
he believes that they are necessary to prevent a future that is worse than the
present. I’m pretty sure that in his own
mind he has justified even those acts that we rightly call atrocities.
What gives me that
confidence? Well, I’ve known a lot of
people. And I am one. I know how we think. I know what we do. When we do something that we would know
instantly was wrong if someone else were doing it, we come up with
reasons—convincing reasons—why what we did wasn’t so wrong after all. We justify it. We redescribe it. We wrap it up in pretty paper and tie it up
with a bow.
When corporations or
governments or churches or any other institution does this, it’s even
worse. People have consciences, but
organizations do not. Organizations will
do almost anything to defend themselves when they are threatened. And the higher the purpose of the
organization, the lower they will descend to do it.
A corporation
trading in energy futures and needing to cover short-term losses, engages in shadier
and shadier accounting practices until it is actively deceiving the public, its
shareholders, and even itself. When the
house of cards collapses it takes down the future of thousands of employees,
retirees and shareholders.
A government that is
trying to protect its citizens in a time of uncertainty gathers information to
better know what to expect, but it doesn’t stop there. It spies on its friends and its own
citizens. It gives itself permission to
torture. It gives itself permission to
execute its own citizens without a trial.
When someone reveals the inner workings of this government because they
love their country and believe that what it is doing is wrong, they are labeled
as traitors.
A church
denomination that is worried about its declining numbers will go pretty far to
suppress dissent. Pastors who extend the
church’s ministry to same-sex couples seeking to marry and who do this because
they are convinced that their vows require them to do so, are labeled as
violators of the covenant and stripped of their ordinations. Ending someone’s career and blocking them
from fulfilling their calling are wrapped up and presented as “upholding a
sacred covenant.”
Evil, injustice and
oppression do not present themselves as such.
They present themselves in the form of something else. The freedom and power God gives us at baptism
must in part have something to do with being able to see through those forms.
It is one thing to
call these things “the beast,” as we did last week. But it’s not as if they come wearing a beast
mask like some errant Trick-or-Treat-er wearing a disguise. No, they are beastly and they come
wearing the mask of some good that we can recognize and seek.
For John of the
Revelation, the figure of the beast was a reality in the world, a reality that
he and his readers knew well as the Roman Empire. What John does in the Revelation is to strip
away the mask of the Empire of his day to reveal the beastly reality behind the
mask of culture, prosperity and order.
One of the great
contributions of scholarship in the last quarter century or so has been to show
us just how much the reality of the Empire is to be found in the New
Testament. Jesus, it is clear, both
opposed the Empire and its local collaborators and was convinced that God
opposed it, too. Paul mocked the claims
of the Empire. Revelation was openly
hostile to the Empire. The author of
Luke and Acts, while unwilling to see it simply as doing God’s work, was
willing to see and to use the good that the Empire had done.
Empire is always a
mixed bag. It’s hard to condemn it out
of hand. In a wonderful sketch in Monte
Python’s Life of Brian, a band of Judean revolutionaries, the Judean
Peoples Front, gathers to write a manifesto condemning the Romans. The Romans have bled the people dry, their
leader complains, “And what have they ever given us in return?!” He means that as a rhetorical question, but
the members of his group, none of them terribly bright, begin to offer answers:
The aqueduct? The sanitation? Roads?
The list goes on and on. Finally,
their leader summarizes their progress: “All right, but apart from the
sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, |a
fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”[1]
But behind whatever
good the Empire does—and it does quite a bit—Empire is always about a single
thing: It’s about more. Empire never has enough. Of anything.
Not enough stuff. Not enough
power. Not enough space. Empire is always seeking to expand.
Empire always sees
itself as an exception: “Before us there was chaos, lack of freedom, poverty,
immorality.” Outside of Empire there is
darkness and disorder. Empire sees it as
its duty to expand, to bring light and order.
Empire always believes that it is ordained by God to fulfill a role in
history. Empire cannot understand why
anyone would not want to be a part of it.
Empire regards hostility toward it as a character flaw. Empire says of those who resist it, “They are
barbarians who do not understand civilization and order” or “They are fanatics
who hate our freedoms.”
In theological
terms, Empire sets itself up as divine. Its
laws must be obeyed. Its virtues must be
celebrated. Its vices must be
ignored. Its myths must be believed and
professed. Its rituals must be
observed. Its symbols must be
worshiped. In the end Empire can
tolerate nothing outside of itself. It
will answer to nothing above itself. This
is why Empire and “evil, injustice and oppression” are so closely tied
together. This is why our call to resist
evil, injustice and oppression is also a call to resist Empire and imperial
thinking wherever it is found.
In the New Testament
era, in the days of Jesus and Paul and the next generation or two, Empire was a
Roman Empire. By unpacking the theology
of the Roman Empire, early Christians were able to see the forms of evil,
injustice and oppression that were part of their day. They also recognized that Empire isn’t just
out there.
Empire is a
principle more than a form of government.
When we live in this world, dominated as it is by imperial thinking, we
breathe in Empire with every breath. When
Empire becomes a part of us, we, too, seek more. We want more power, more stuff, more of
everything. We begin to regard getting
these things as a mandate, something God wants and expects for us to do. We start justifying whatever it takes to get
them. When what I’m calling Empire
becomes a part of us, it is what the Christian tradition calls sin.
And seeing this, early
Jesus followers mounted their resistance.
They refused to worship the emperor as divine. They shunned the games and gladiatorial
contests. They refused the meat that had
been offered to the symbols of the Empire.
They refused violence. They
formed alternative assemblies. But they
also recognized that the resistance would have to be internal as well. They embraced an ethic of love, justice and
peace. They resisted sin in themselves and
they looked to each other for help. In
short, they accepted “the freedom and power God [gave] them to resist evil,
injustice and oppression in whatever forms they [presented] themselves.”
Since then, Empire has
taken many forms. Along the way, in a
story that begins even before the New Testament was written, Jesus’ followers
found it hard to keep from being swallowed by Empire. Increasingly, they gave up resisting Empire
in its external forms and limited themselves to resisting sin. They even rejoiced that they lived in a
Christian Empire. But a Christian Empire
is still Empire.
Occasionally there
were groups of Jesus followers who saw the need to resist Empire in both its
internal and external forms. Men and
women formed communities of monastics to set the ethics of Empire aside and to
put into practice the ethic they learned from Jesus. Benedict—for whom our neighbor to the north
is named—is the most famous among them, but there were tens of thousands of
them. In the high middle ages, Francis of
Assisi renewed a call to this kind of resistance.
But for the most
part, we Christians have limited our notion of sin to the attitudes, thoughts, and
motives of individual Christians and the actions that spring from them. We have confined religion to matters of
belief. We have invented private life so
that Christianity could be safe from Empire and, perhaps more importantly, so
Empire could be safe from Christianity.
In our day Empire’s
form has changed. Today Empire takes the
form of a globalized, militarized, financialized capitalism. It is no longer a place that we can
leave. It is now a single system in
which we all participate. Empire is more
alive than ever. And while it has
brought great benefits to some of us, it is still the author of evil, injustice
and oppression.
If I were in your
place, I might remain unconvinced. In
the next four weeks, I will offer some of the ways in which Empire weighs upon us,
some of what it is costing us. I hope
also to offer some strategies of resistance.
In the meantime, here is the first: the invitation not to take the form
of our world as natural, the invitation to see it differently, the invitation
to see through it, in short, the invitation to accept the freedom and power that
God gives us.
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