(next in the series Lessons in the Beginning)
Texts on Sunday, September 4, 2005
Genesis 18: 17-33; Luke 13: 1-5
In the meeting room at Attica prison twice each week, fifteen to twenty inmates sit down with four or five volunteers from CEPHAS for a conversation. When I am there, I often look at each face, marveling that they are a black man, a black man, a black man, a black man, a Puerto Rican, a black man. One out of twenty is white. I marvel because my country, which I love, is such an astoundingly racist nation that it lets this gash in its side bleed uncontrollably, and commits nothing to heal the wound.
The photographs from New Orleans brought these thoughts back to mind all week. Once more, the faces were a black person, a black person, another black person. One out of twenty–out of a hundred?–was white, just like in the prison. Is this a coincidence? Barack Obama, the black senator from Illinois, de-emphasized the race connection in a comment this week. “What’s true in this country is what’s true across the world, which is in the midst of natural disasters the poor and the vulnerable end up getting hit the hardest.” He is right, of course. But why are the poor in America so black? This is not a coincidence. In New Orleans, according to the last census, 67% of the 500,000 citizens are black. Thirty percent were living below the poverty line, against a national average of 13%. A 2004 study of the effects that would be wrought on New Orleans by a fierce hurricane established that the city would be inundated by flood and that 100,000 people would not be able to leave, and that these would be poor people. Black people. Yet what action was taken? In her New York Times column yesterday, Maureen Dowd wrote:
The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But the President and Congress agreed to a $286 billion pork-filled highway bill that included a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Now, in this congregation, probably no one fully believes that God sends natural disasters as portents or punishments to correct the evils of mankind. Many people still do believe such things, however. The bigoted fool Pat Robertson manipulates millions of minds to follow his appalling god of wrath. But here, I hope that god is dead. Still, many people glide with the notion that even though God doesn’t punish, still God must have something to do with the storm, even if it’s only to step in and calm it down a bit. Jordan Flaherty, editor of a New Orleans magazine, reported that
…as hurricane Katrina approached, our governor urged us to “Pray the hurricane down” to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio to local stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. (Published at Alternet.com)
Let’s get clear about God, humans, and prayer. God has nothing to do with altering natural events from their natural course. God doesn’t send them. God doesn’t change them. God doesn’t stop them. Not rain. Not flood. Not fire. Not earthquake. Not monstrous winds. Prayer sent “up” into such events is prayer sent nowhere, for there is no such god waiting to act on the world. The non-existent god which dominates the fantasies of so many Americans, contrary to all experience, has one real power: to divert our mind from our God-given power to think and act morally and responsibly in crisis, and before crisis, and after crisis; in a word, to excuse racism. To wish to pray a storm down a level–to think there’s a deity waiting like a politician to sense the voice of the people–is to mislead the precious flow of human thought into stubbornly ineffective channels, so that nothing ever changes, and virtually all the faces of sorrow stay black. Kill that god. Abraham started to, you might say. You finish it.
The story of Abraham’s argument with God over the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah may seem an odd offering to our ears while New Orleans is still awash with mire and mayhem. Doesn’t this story show a god who, out of extreme anger, intends to cause (and will cause) a city’s destruction by earthquake and fire? Of course it does. But as we have experienced time and again from these Genesis stories, not one of them is to be interpreted as having literally taken place. They are all stories about the deep changes humans undergo when they begin to grow spiritually. This story is about something much more interesting than the ancient superstition that the gods caused evil events to punish bad deeds. What is unique here is the conversation with God. Let us see what it shows.
“Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do,” asks this god, “seeing that Abraham shall become a great nation, and all the nations shall be blessed in him? No,” he decides, “for I have chosen him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” With that monologue, this god prepares to tell Abraham what is about to befall the cities. But actually, as the story unfolds, we see that this god is confused about his need to bring Abraham up to speed on the plans. A psychotherapist might say that at some level this god knew he needed help to become the kind of god he was destined to be, but he didn’t know how to get it. Not infrequently, people ask of a pastor, “Who’s your pastor?” Well! The story in Genesis 18 is basically asking the question, “God, who’s your God? Who’s your guide?” The answer is: Abraham, a man–not a perfect man, but a sound one. God’s moral vision is gently guided upward by a sound, thoughtful, humble man.
This is absurd! This is wonderful! Once you get unstuck from the error of literal interpretation, you can feel the subversive power of the story. Of course there was never such a conversation between God and man. But most certainly such conversations go on and on within human minds, conversations between one’s imagination of god and one’s own high, best intuition for what is true and for what must be done. Now, look: If your sense for what is true comes in way up here at this level, and your thought about God or what you’re taught about God comes in down here at this level, which is inspired by the Spirit of God? Could anything be clearer? For those who trust in the power and reality of God, only true God can be the source of fresh moral vision. Therefore, true God is hidden behind the false god in human thought and tradition, because the false god only serves base human purposes. From time to time, says this story, a man–a woman, a human– grows up! From time to time, a person encounters within herself a depth till now unmet, a depth sounded deep in God, a height beyond the heavens. Sometimes, true God becomes suddenly manifest to human consciousness, and then you know that that god of your fantasies is false, and you start to take him down: 50, 45, 40, 30, 20, 10.
Why stop at ten? For God’s sake, and for humans’. True God must not be removed from the scene of evil and injustice. Zero would mean God cared not whether righteousness were found in the city. Then it would be time to move on from such a god. But Abraham stops at ten to leave to you and to me the business of tearing down the rest of the false god to whom we have prayed, and of building up within ourselves and our cities the righteousness and the justice which can sustain them, which can keep them from collapsing under the burden of poverty and ignorance and injustice and greed.
“Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” What true God was about to do was to stop hiding from Abraham behind a childish fantasy. True God was about to reveal that the divine light is already inside Abraham, already inside you. But people don’t want this news. By the thousands and the millions, humans run from true God within to the false God of heaven above. They ask for hurricanes to step down because it comforts them against their dim awareness that they should long since have been asking their leaders to turn back the tide of greed and violence that emanate from Washington as tax cuts for the rich and wars waged on miserable foreigners to keep oil flowing into our SUVs. Why, by Jesus’ time, Abraham’s story was old, but the mass of men fleeing from true God within had grown only greater. “What!” exclaims Jesus. “Those eighteen killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them–do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in the city? Do you think those thousands of black men and women and children caught and dying in New Orleans were worse offenders than all the others living in the city?” Jesus is appalled at their theology–at their stubborn theory of god, shoring up their sense of privilege and righteousness like a levee against the waters of true God. “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
What can this mean? Clearly Jesus did not mean that God would flatten them if they didn’t repent; Jesus had just repudiated the idea that God flattens anyone for misbehavior. Therefore, to repent must mean for them to turn from their idea of god and stop believing that god metes out justice on the bad while the good children watch from the stair rail. Grow up. You are the place where God is willing to act. You are the scene of God’s justice, or not. You are the mind of God’s wisdom on earth, or not. You are the maker of God’s peace, or not. This is the meaning of repentance, and the irreversible incarnation. In Christ, God is showing you that you are the dwelling place of the divine. To repent means to accept this, to talk about it, to act like it, and to hold silence in remorse when the evidence floods in that we have not accepted God’s gift and our responsibility, but have dashed off to our green greed with foolish prayers on our lips, leaving the poor in the mud.
Now something is going to change. Hear how the conservative columnist David Brooks was thinking late this week in the New York Times:
The first rule of the social fabric–that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable–was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield…And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week’s national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation’s psyche . . . ** Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.
In order to know God behind the god we thought, the god we were taught; in order to communicate with Truth, rather than our imagination, we must learn like Abraham how to listen for God within and how to overrule every temptation to keep things as they are by praying old prayers to the gods in our head. We must fundamentally change the way things are. For unless we do so, we will all perish just as they did–suddenly, without ever awakening to the living God. Can you hear the levee groaning?
** There’s a good definition for repentance–shp
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, August 2005
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