A Beastly Reality
Daniel 7:1-7, 13-15; Revelation 13:1-4; 15:1-4Epiphany 2 (Series)
January 19, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
It is no
secret that the United Methodist Church has its struggles. We’re not alone. All the mainline churches are dealing with
one thing or another. Being a member of
a church hasn’t been fashionable in several decades and membership numbers are
declining. Even the Southern Baptist
Church, the one that we used to envy for their numbers, is dealing with an
actual decline.
Denominations
are coming up with various approaches to turning the numbers around. There will Bold New Plans and Visionary
Strategies. Words like “vital” and
“dynamic” will be thrown around. Although
we are nearly as far from the Bishop’s office as you can get and still be in Iowa, I suspect
that even we will be invited to join in the fun.
I believe a
more fruitful response to our place in a changing world is to ask the question:
What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?
Or, to frame the question a little differently, “What does it mean to be
a part of the community of the baptized?”
For me the most useful way to begin to answer either version of that
question, but especially the latter, is to turn to the baptismal covenant and
especially to the questions that are labeled “Renunciation of Sin and
Profession of Faith.”
In the
Christian tradition, becoming a follower of Jesus has always involved a radical
reorientation of life, a turning away from one thing and toward another, a
shifting of fundamental allegiances from one set to another. In our tradition this is called,
“repentance.” The word “repentance”
translates the Greek word metanoia that means a change of mind which for
the ancients was that part of us where we not only do our thinking, but also
our valuing and our deciding. Repentance
doesn’t just mean changing our mind, like changing an answer on a multiple choice
test from “a” to “c.” It means some very
big changes in the ways that we think in the deepest part of us.
Repentance
has always meant a turning away as well as a turning toward. And our baptismal covenant has always
included some question that gets at what is being turned away from. We have always had to renounce something in
order to be baptized. In the late fourth
century in a document called the Apostolic Constitutions, those being
baptized were required to say, “I renounce Satan, and his works, and his pomps,
and his worships, and his angels, and his inventions, and all things that are
under him.”[1] I’m not sure what a “pomp” is, but this list
is pretty comprehensive.
When John
Wesley revised and abridged the Anglican Book of Common Prayer so that
newly-formed Methodist Episcopal Church would have a prayer book to use, he included
these questions: “Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp
and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal
desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, or be led by them?”[2]
We Methodists
apparently got a little squeamish about this kind of language, because we
dropped almost all of it for a while. In
1964 The Methodist Hymnal had whittled the renunciation down to part of
a question: “Do you truly and earnestly repent of your sins…?”
Sadly and
oddly, there is only mention of our own sins, as if all that is required of us
is that we stop doing bad things or maybe that we stop being bad people. How can this be enough after all the wars of
our history, after the Holocaust, after racism, after sexism, after
imperialism, after heterosexism, and all the other ways we have of being
perfectly good people who because we are part of a broken system manage unintentionally
and unconsciously to inflict untold suffering on our fellow human beings all
without having done anything bad? A
notion of sin that stretches no further than individuals doing bad things is
hopelessly undersized.
So, our
current hymnal asks two questions that get at the question of renunciation: “Do
you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this
world and repent of your sin?... [and] Do you accept the freedom and power God
gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they
present themselves?” [3] That second question, I think, really gets at
the issue of what we are turning from in order to turn toward Jesus and his
God.
I’ve been
ruminating on that question for the better part of a quarter of a century,
now. It comes back to me at odd times, during
a newscast, say, or a session of the Annual Conference. But it took on a new sense of urgency three
years ago when I was a Sister Parish delegate to El Salvador.
It was only
the second or third day of our visit. We
were still in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. We had been joined by three or four of the
members of the Potrerillos community. Beto
Monge, known affectionately as Don Beto, was one of them. We had a schedule of visits to local sites of
interest and meetings with people who could help us understand El Salvador’s
situation and struggle.
One briefing
in particular stuck with me. It was
given by William Castillo, a young man with an organization whose English name
would be the Center for the Investigation of Investment and Commerce, abbreviated
CEICOM in Spanish. He talked with us
about the Salvadoran government’s struggle with Pacific RIM, the US subsidiary
of a Canadian mining company that has requested and been denied permits to
extract the gold and other precious metals in El Salvador’s northern mountains.
There are an
estimated fifteen million ounces of recoverable gold in El Salvador. Gold is selling at about $1250 an ounce these
days and would cost about $175 an ounce to recover. That adds up to about $16 billion dollars of
profit for Pacific RIM and its partners.[4]
Mining gold,
though, is not simply a matter of picking up nuggets that are lying around on
the ground. The gold in El Salvador is found
in ore that has to be dug out, crushed and chemically processed in order to
produce the gold itself. A reaction
between the air and the ore produces sulfuric acid as soon as the ore is mined
and crushed. The chemicals that are used
to extract the gold—sodium, potassium and calcium cyanide among them—are highly
toxic. The process uses a lot of water and
leaves a lot of polluted water behind. This
toxic waste would be stored—presumably forever—in artificial lagoons.
Water is
scarce in El Salvador and widespread shortages are predicted by 2030 or
so. Water-intensive industries are not a
useful addition to El Salvador’s economy.
The toxic waste would have to be stored virtually forever, but Pacific
RIM will only be there for a few years. When
the gold is gone, they’ll be gone, too, leaving their toxic waste behind in
artificial lagoons. El Salvador is
seismically active. It is only a matter
of time before the lagoons fail and a toxic stew is released into El Salvador’s
only significant source of drinkable water.
Pacific RIM
calls its process “Green” mining. That
sounds good, but they’ve mined gold in Guatemala and the environmental damage
has been serious.
In return
for this damage and the risk of environmental catastrophe, Pacific RIM promises
jobs for Salvadorans. Of course, on
closer inspection, in turns out that the good jobs will go to people who are
brought in from the outside and the jobs that are given to local Salvadorans will
be dangerous, low-paying and short-term.
As I
listened to this report it occurred to me that the story was a familiar
one. I had heard it in Decorah from
those who struggled to keep Wal-Mart out of Decorah and then more recently to
prevent them building a “supercenter.” Wal-Mart
wanted to have access to consumer dollars.
It proposed to build or expand its store. The damage to the environment would be
non-existent or minimal. And there would
be jobs. No or little damage. And jobs.
This is the
pattern that I had heard before and was hearing again 1900 miles away from
home. It won’t cost anything (or at
least not very much) and there will be jobs.
But the costs are always higher than promised and the jobs are never as
good. Change the names and a few of
details, and there is the pattern. It
was immediately clear to me that the struggle of Salvadorans to protect their
water supply from Pacific RIM and the struggle of Decorans to protect their
community from Wal-Mart were two pieces of a much bigger reality. I felt this with the force of revelation.
I shared
this epiphany with the group of North Americans and Salvadorans and, as what I
was saying was translated bit by bit, I saw Don Beto nodding his head.
In the next
week, this pattern, this correspondence between their experience and ours, continued
to haunt me. I could see the similarity,
but I could not seem to grasp what that larger reality was of which these two
episodes, if you will, were a part. What
is the bigger picture, maybe even the biggest picture?
The writers
of the New Testament spent some time struggling with this question. They came up with names for this bigger or
biggest picture. John sometimes calls it
“the world,” but I have a hard time thinking of “the world” as a bad
thing. I see too much of God’s lovingly
creative hand at work in the natural world, especially, to imagine “the world”
as a destructive force. Paul calls it
“the world” sometimes and at other times he uses terms like “powers and
principalities.” That’s helpful, I
think, because it suggests that there is a spiritual reality behind what might
appear on the surface to be merely about corporations and governments.
But there
was another metaphor, drawn from an unlikely source, that seemed to come closer
to capturing the voracious and often vicious character of a Pacific RIM or a
Wal-Mart. The image came to me during the
farewell party on our last evening in Potrerillos. I called Julieta Borja, one of our guides and
translators, to come with me and we found Don Beto. I didn’t want to trust this to my own meager
Spanish.
“Don Beto,”
I began, “I have heard about your struggle.
I have seen it. You struggle
against a beast. We struggle, too. And we struggle against a beast. But I now see that there is only one beast that
you and I are resisting. Your struggle
is my struggle, and my struggle is yours, because we are both struggling
against the same beast. I will stand
with you and I will not forget. This is
my promise to you.” Julieta had tears in
her eyes. Beto smiled.
Yes, I am
convinced of it. Behind many of our troubles,
our struggles, our pains and our suffering lies a single enormous beastly
reality. It is hungry, insatiable even. The language that Daniel and the Revelation
use, language that I have often found off-putting and bizarre, I now find
useful. It gives us a way to talk about
the opposition that we meet as we try to live as Jesus’ followers for one
thing. Next week we will try to describe
it more scientifically, but the image of a beast gives us a way to speak about
it even when our science fails us. It
gives us a handle on it. A name, even a
strange one like “the beast,” gives us a little of that “freedom and power to
resist” that our baptism talks about.
But there is
another and rather practical advantage that this image gives us. If like me you want to claim that “freedom
and power…to resist evil, injustice and oppression,” you may find the sheer
size of the task overwhelming. Where do
we begin? Which are the greater evils,
injustices and oppressions that call for our resistance? Sensing that there is one beastly reality that
lies behind all of them changes things. If
there is only one beast against which Beto and I and all of us are struggling, then
it doesn’t matter where we begin. Anywhere
is as good as anywhere else. Like a
colony of ants resisting the invasion of its hill by a predatory beetle, we can
all of us bite the part that’s right in front of us, knowing that we’re all in
this together.
Whatever you
are struggling against, whatever evil you are confronting, whatever injustice
you are suffering, whatever structures are oppressing you, know this: our
baptism gives us the freedom and power to resist it. Know this, too: Your struggle is my struggle,
and my struggle is yours, because we are both struggling against the same
beast. I will stand with you and I will
not forget. This is my promise to
you. ¡Su lucha es mi lucha y la lucha
sigue! / Your struggle is my struggle and the struggle goes on!
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