Beta Release
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Proper 27C (25th Sunday after Pentecost)
November 10, 2013
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
From time to time I have been
accused of mixing religion and politics.
In one sense I hope to deny that
accusation. If by politics we mean,
partisan politics, advocating for the policies or endorsing the candidates of
one political party or another, then I say that I work very hard to avoid doing
this.
Of course, like any other citizen, I
have my opinions. I am more persuaded by
some arguments and less by others. I
find some candidates more winsome than others.
I can and do argue forcefully for my opinions, but I try to avoid doing
that from the pulpit, for example. Whether
I succeed at that isn't really up to me to judge. I know that there is some "leakage"
from the part of me that is a citizen and a member of a political party and the
part of me that is an ordained elder of the United Methodist Church and
appointed to be your pastor. I hope that
you can overlook that occasional leakage and that you are not expecting your
pastors to be politically uncommitted.
But there is another sense in which
I could be accused of mixing religion and politics. I would not only have to plead guilty, but I
think I would be unfaithful to my ordination if I did not.
If religion is more than simply
believing that there is a God and trying to be a nice person, if religion is
about our deepest commitments and our highest hopes, and if politics is more
than partisan, if politics is about how we arrange the life of our community,
our nation, and our world, and about how we share and exercise and think about
power, then not only is separating religion and politics undesirable, it is
impossible. And we see that clearly in a
reading like 2 Thessalonians 2.
It's not right on the surface, unless
you know what to look for, but it's there.
In part this explains the strange language that we find: "the
person who is lawless," the person "who is headed for
destruction," and the one who "sits in God's temple, displaying
himself to show that he is God."
Who is the writer talking
about? I believe that the answer to that
is in that last phrase, "displaying himself to show that he is
God". There was in fact someone in
the world of this text who did just that, whose image was displayed in temples
all around the Roman world, especially in the eastern part of that world, where
this letter was written and read. And
that person was the Emperor.
The Emperor, the writer tells us, far
from being the person who guarantees order, is the "lawless"
one. The Emperor, far from being the one
who brings security, is "headed for destruction." The Empire worked hard to control its
message, to impress its subjects with its power and wisdom, to present itself
as inevitable and eternal. "Pay no
attention to the man behind the curtain," the Empire says. But it's too late. Our writer like some earlier version of
Edward Snowden has pulled back the curtain and displayed the Empire for what it
really is.
Then as now, the Empire does not
want the truth told. Then as now, the
Empire hunts down whistle-blowers. The
difference between now and then is the strategy that the whistle-blower
used. Rather than posting this
revelation on WikiLeaks, or publishing it in The Guardian, the
whistle-blower wrote in coded language that let readers know what was going on while
maintaining "plausible deniability."
"What do you mean this is about the Emperor? Where does it say that?"
So what about the writer's claim that
the Emperor is actually "the lawless one headed for
destruction"? How can law
enforcement be lawless? It happens any
time rulers decide they do not need to answer to anyone above themselves. It happens when security agencies break the
law to gather information and shield themselves in the secrecy that is supposed
to protect us rather than them. It
happens when our jails are filled with drug addicts and those who wantonly
destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars, along with the dreams of millions, walk
around not only free, but richer than ever.
It happens when one man claims the power to deny with the stroke of a
pen the right of a citizen, something even the Emperor would not have dared to
do. When criminality is
institutionalized, whether it is the person of the Emperor or the agencies of a
bureaucracy, we may speak of a ruler as "the lawless one."
This institutionalized lawlessness with
its illusion of power and control, oddly enough, does not result in
security. This is the other claim in our
text. Institutionalized lawlessness
makes our world less safe, not more. It
closes off debate that could lead to relief for those who otherwise have no way
to resist except through violence. It
builds resentment among the weak. When
law does not lead to justice, law loses its claim to obedience.
I've colored in the picture a bit, but
the outline is all there. Things are
bad, says the writer of 2 Thessalonians, and they are going to get worse. It's not a very optimistic outlook. It's not a very American outlook.
We are perpetual optimists. We believe, or at least we have to say we
believe, that everything is going to turn out okay. All problems have solutions. A new medicine will be invented. A new invention will fix everything. When we are sick we have to be upbeat even
when we are scared and desperate. Even
cashiers have the cheek to command us to "Have a nice day!" Like Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, who
finds herself in the middle of a civilization that has collapsed with a useless
plantation and rudely deserted by Rhett Butler, we are required to say, "Tomorrow
is another day!"
The Bible has a way of looking at
the world without rose-colored glasses. It
looks reality in the face and names it fully.
Things are bad, says the writer of 2 Thessalonians, and they are going
to get worse. He is not optimistic. Neither am I, for that matter, even if that
brands me as suspect and perhaps even un-American. "I’m not optimistic," as Wendell
Berry says, "but I'm hopeful."[1]
There is hope in this text, but it
isn't based on technology or management technique. The hope comes because we are not the only
actors in this drama. There is an Other who
has plans. And it's a surprise. God's plan for transforming a world system
that institutionalizes lawlessness, a system in which human beings claim to be
God and seek to be worshiped, a system that is doomed to self-destruction, God's
plan is…us.
Really? Yes, really. Not us as individuals, but us as the
Church. We as the Church—with our
squabbling, our scandals, our worship wars, our fights between liberals and
conservatives, our institutional inertia, and our commitment to our own comfort
and our buildings—we are God's response to a broken world.
The writer here calls us the
"first crop of the harvest" to bring wholeness and healing to the
world. The first crop of the harvest is
often the best, the sweetest, the juiciest, the most flavorful, but I wonder if
our writer isn't dressing things up a little.
I wonder if we're not something more like a beta release.
"Beta release" is an
expression that comes from the software development industry. When someone gets an idea for a new computer
program or an app for a tablet or smart phone, they organize the work. If it's a complex program, they will assemble
a team. The program gets broken down
into its various parts. Decisions get
made about what it's supposed to be able to do and how. It goes from someone's bright idea to a
working version. It gets tested in every
way the designers can think of. When a
new program is tested it usually breaks.
The design team fixes it, patches it up and they test it again. They do that until it works no matter what
they throw at it.
But every computer programmer knows that
the work isn't done yet. They know that
when real people in the real world get their hands on it, they
will do things to their program that the designers never thought of. The program will break. A lot.
They know this, so they have a strategy, a deliberate part of the
development process called a "beta release."
They give away the program to a few
people in the real world. Those users misuse
the program, and find the bugs that testing missed, and have the fun of trying
out a new program. In return the
developer gets information about improvements that need to be made and problems
that need to be fixed. Then the
programmers go back to work. When those improvements and fixes are done, it's
ready to be released to the general public as version 1.0.
We as the Church are the beta
release of the Reign of God. God has an
idea—the Kingdom of God—for how to mend the world. It involves new ways for humans to be in
community. The new community should
shape new human beings modeled on Jesus.
The new human beings should be able to form new communities, in a kind
of feedback loop, the opposite of a vicious circle, one that gets better and
better instead of worse and worse. That's
the way it should work, but the real test of course is in the real
world. And that's where we come in. We as the Church are the beta release of the
Reign of God.
The Reign of God is still pretty
buggy. It crashes. A lot.
But we don’t need to lose heart. A
beta release is expected to crash. The
purpose of the beta release is to find the bugs and get them fixed. So we're still full of bugs, but we're also
on the way to something better.
But I also note that the program is
basically sound. New community does
fashion new people who make a new community.
In a violent world, it fashions people who believe that peace is a
better way and who—some in big ways and others in small ways—practice living
peacefully. In a world that celebrates
greed, it fashions people who will give away money that they need so that
people whose lives have been shattered by winds and storm surges a half a world
away can be sustained in life and helped to rebuild. In a world that carefully protects the lies
that keep it going, it fashions people who from time to time dare to tell the
truth. In a world governed by fear, it
fashions a people who are sometimes able to live out of love instead.
Yes, it's buggy. It crashes.
A lot. But between crashes it
runs. Yeah, we're a beta release. So we can stop expecting ourselves and each
other to be perfect. We're a beta
release. So we can stop indulging in
optimism and pessimism. We have, as our
writer says, a "good hope" because the Developer isn't through with
us yet. Sometime—we don't know exactly
when—the Reign of God version 1.0 will be released, without the bugs and with a
beautiful, intuitive interface, a program that runs without glitches. In the meantime, we have the privilege of
having a hand in its development. In the
meantime, as the text says, "May God encourage your hearts and give you
strength in every good thing you do or say." Amen.
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[1] Wes Jackson,
quoting Wendell Berry in Joshua J. Yates, "A Conversation with
Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson," The Hedgehog Review: Critical
Reflections on Contemporary Culture, 14,2 (Summer 2012), 71.
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