Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it as “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends . . .”
When something breaks, we see what at once, or search for it. But when something works, like the stairs of a stone path or the good will of a teen, who can say where the working is? Anything that works comprises an infinite quantity of good links, from the big stuff we’ve just described right down to the mysteriously bonding molecules and atoms . . .
The blunt fact is that scriptures Old and New pronounce a fulsome God damn not on foreign nations but on the prophets’ own land. Stiff-necked Bible-thumpers prefer Micah mounted in museum glass to the real thing. But if we do not take scissors to our scriptures, then those blunt words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright exactly match the purpose of the prophets: to that land which perverts equity through greed and force the word is, God damn!
When Bill Moyers was interviewing Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religions and mythic literature, he asked Campbell whether he had ever adhered to any of the traditions he studied. In a word, Have you been a believer? Campbell said he had not. Moyers pressed. Then could he say he fully knew the religions? Campbell acknowledged the void in his manner of knowing religions.
Jesus always demanded the discipline of diversity from his disciples. More than words, his teaching aid was a table of food and fellowship. His invitation was to any and to all to come together at table and eat. He got specific. Do not invite your friends and family to your feasts. Instead, he said, Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Two questions, now: Why them? And, now that we’re about 100,000 Sundays into the game, How are we doing?
I have never read stories of any nation so boldly self-critical as those of ancient Israel. What a gift! The people were old, tired, and few, say the stories, and they sinned monstrously. By all the stars, they should have failed. What did they do to get through? The answers are here in Just these few dozen stories called Genesis, kept because they contain lessons from the beginning for how a community in crisis can come through.
Recent Comments