[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

A Name

Sometimes sins need to be named, not so much in judgment as for 
clarification. Anger, for example: there's legitimate, proper anger, which 
is healthy, and the Sin of Anger which is quite another matter. From a 
God-stuff perspective, the Sin of Anger is setting a grievance in God's 
place and worshiping it as a deity; from a psychological perspective, the 
Sin of Anger is being stuck in simmering rage. I'd say passive aggression 
qualifies as the Sin of Anger, too.

There needs to be a name for the mindset of the political religious right, 
and I'm not sure what it should be. It may emerge as I'm writing. The 
mindset, so far as I can see, identifies the economic and political agenda 
of the current administration as being God's plan and therefore 
automatically justified, no matter what unholy mess it leaves behind. 
Because it is God's plan, it's okay if the means are a little scummy 
because the end is divinely ordained. In short, it has co-opted God as a 
political and national ally. I'm not sure if the people responsible for 
this mindset actually *asked* God about this. I know that even if they 
think they did, God does not skywrite -- and it's very easy to hear in 
"God's voice" the words we secretly long for. Been there, done that, paid 
the price.

It's not the first time this has happened. Ancient Israel identified its 
own political agenda with God and  God seemed, at first, to oblige; Israel 
cobbled itself together a homeland by conquest, crowing at each victory 
"See? God was with us. We won!" But it didn't last. Israel found itself 
attacked and vanquished, and the trauma was terrible: God was *not* with 
us. What had we done to offend God so terribly? Conquerors washed back and 
forth across that contested bit of real estate. Israel managed to free 
itself in the Maccabean revolt, only to fall under Roman domination a 
century later. The more that Pharisees like Saul identified God with Jewish 
nationalism, the more fraught the political situation became and the higher 
the price the Jews paid in blood and terror, until the whole situation 
erupted, the nation was shattered and the Jews were flung into exile.

It's frightening to see something of the same religious nationalism going 
on in at least some quarters of the largest and most powerful country in 
the world. It is particularly scary when one lives in a very much smaller 
country with a very, very long undefended border and resources that that 
big neighbour might just decide to covet, for holy reasons.  I am, for the 
first time in the thirty-plus years I've lived in Canada, mildly frightened 
of what the U.S. might do.

The point of being a Christian, it seems to me, is that God does NOT give 
us permission to act in our own best worldly interests. Quite the contrary. 
If God were that sort of God, Jesus would have been the Messiah that the 
Jews of his time craved -- a fighting Messiah who would throw off the Roman 
yoke and restore Israel's independence.

But that's not the Messiah we got. The Messiah we got was no holy warrior; 
he was a poor man, a healer, a wanderer and teacher. So far from scrambling 
for political authority, he allowed himself to be crucified -- a horrible 
and humiliating way to die, one never mentioned in polite society -- for 
our sake. He spoke up for the poor and the marginalized, not the mighty; he 
called for peace, not holy war. When he talked about setting people against 
each other and the coming conflict, his words were descriptive, not 
prescriptive -- not "this is what should happen", but "this is what's going 
to happen," and given what the political landscape was like, he was just 
calling it as he saw it, prophetically.

God calls upon us to tend, not to conquer, to serve, not to grab power, to 
work for peace, not to zap our enemies.  God does not call us to wealth and 
power and getting our own needs met at others' expense.  God does not 
justify our behaviour because we've been "born again"; instead, God expects 
us to hear and serve the Good News of God's love to all, and the more we 
proclaim our Christianity, the more we have to behave like Christians. To 
say otherwise, one has to rip individual Scripture verses out of context 
and warp them around, silencing the whole meaning of the Gospel -- a piece 
of transparently manipulative self-serving that is profoundly 
anti-evangelical in places like Canada.  So much for spreading the Good News...

Politics and evangelism aside, the theology of the religious right makes me 
cranky, because it's kindergarten thinking -- but it's kindergarteners 
whose ears are closed to reality and whose thumbs are on the big red 
button.  And that's frightening.

I have to remember that the world has looked this dark before, or even 
darker, and that while the damage was substantial and the costs were 
terrible, we have come through worse. I have to trust that our Creator will 
indeed win through the darkness in the end, and that we face God's judgment 
-- what we have made with what we were given, and why.

Dear Lord, deliver us.

The name? I still haven't got one. I'll think of something.




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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.