Jubilee Justice and 'Dikaiosune Theou'

"Seek first the kingdom of God and its justice." - Jesus (Matthew 6:33 NEB) "I have come to see in deeper ways the implications of my faith... I can no longer proclaim the Cross and the Resurrection without proclaiming the whole message of the Kingdom [of God] which is justice for all." - Billy Graham in Transformation Jan. - Feb.1989 The bifurcation of 'social gospel' from 'spiritual gospel' is at the root of our long-standing national crisis of claiming the 'righteousness' of Jesus while simultaneously enacting some of the most evil acts of oppression the modern world has seen (chattel slavery, mass genocide of native peoples, etc.) The biblical concept is that to enact Jubilee Justice is the righteousness of God. They aren't bifurcated. They aren't competing. There is no point at which struggling alongside of the oppressed becomes too political and messy and so we should give it up and focus on spiritual truths and salvation of souls. The Biblical thought is the Jubilee Justice is salvation. It is righteousness. It is the gospel. What's more, the Biblical concept is that when God's people try to separate justice and liberation from the oppressed as something other than God's righteousness, God sends prophets to declare God's hatred of their spirituality, private good works and morality, and their worship. (See for instance Isaiah 58) God's repeated refrain in the scripture is that any act of worship that occurs when justice is actively being denied is in fact an abomination. Much of the confusion we face today comes through some poor translation work where historically we've insisted on using the word 'righteousness' in place of 'justice'. This flaw shows up in the Christian translations of Old Testament from the Hebrew as well as in the New Testament from the Greek word dikaiosune. Here's a short video primer on the translation from the Greek in particular. I urge you to watch it as it is the essential point of this post. [Note: You'll have to click on this link to get to the video footage as I cannot find a way to embed from Vimeo.] By erasing the Biblical concept of Jubilee Justice from the heart of what modern evangelical Christians call 'the gospel' and putting in its place Righteousness modern evangelical Christianity has turned the gospel into a private spirituality the purpose of which is to obtain eternal life for one's self. However, if we go back to the Biblical concern for Jubilee Justice as taught by the Torah, the Prophets, Jesus and yes, even Paul, suddenly private salvation is no longer the central message of the gospel but is rather a byproduct or a footnote to the divine project of liberation from oppression. We are saved when and insofar as our love for our neighbor (as defined by the Parable of the Good Samaritan) has become inseparable and indistinguishable from our love of self. Suddenly, the gospel become less and less about private spirituality, morality, and salvation and more and more about the politics of liberation through solidarity with the oppressed, the outsider. Jesus never said, "As you were polite to the most wealthy and powerful of people on the planet, taking every measure to ensure they can eat at whatever posh restaurant they want to whenever they want to, so you've done it unto me. And in fact, this is the essence of salvation and your participation in it." But Jesus definitely said something very close to, "When you worked to release children who were stuck in concentration camps to return them to their families, and ensured that they received sanctuary either where you lived or some other place they could call home, so you did it to me. And in fact, as much as you did so you participated in salvation. And to the degree you didn't care about refugees, or actively participated in their oppression, or equivocated about their importance because private morality made you uncomfortable, you participated in your own damnation."
If you have ears to hear the time to start hearing is now.

Sanctuary as an Act of Worship

In the winter of 2016/17 I began meditating on the spiritual meaning of a refugee. I encourage you to read the post at the link before finishing here. As a guide for my meditation I turned to Hannah Arendt who wrote at length on the topic as her moral philosophy was shaped to a large degree by her experience as a refugee. Hannah Arendt was a Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler who was then shunned and condemned to the status of 'meaningless' and 'valueless' by the rest of the world because she was a refugee. One must remain a refugee because one has become a refugee.
Ah, but what is a refugee? A refugee is one who has no place on earth. What is a refugee who is forced to remain a refugee? A person who everyone else, in seeing that a person has no place on earth, consciously decided that they must remain a person who has no place on earth. To refuse to give refuge to a refugee is way of negating the return of a human being to the land of the living, giving them a status of the living dead. It is to have the opportunity to offer salvation to the damned and to consciously choose to re-damn them.
To refuse a refugee, then, is an act that is, frankly, more violent than murder. Perhaps this is why scripture is so vocal about the raw evil of refusing to help a refugee.
But there's more. Refugees are more vulnerable than any other group of being used as a political weapon. In the winter of 2016/17 it became clear to the world that Putin was creating a humanitarian refugee crisis in Syria (with the help of Assad) in order to cleanse Syria as well as to destabilize Western Europe. I wrote at the time: "What does it mean to use people as a weapon, as Putin has done in Syria, by turning millions of 'undesirables' into refugees? What does it mean to refuse refuge to those whose de-humanized status is being used to destabilize democracies, to undercut the principles of rule of law and inalienable human rights? These are the pressing questions we must ask in this time if we are to remain morally and spiritually resistant to genocide." My fear at the time was that it would only be a matter of time before Trump attempted to copy Putin by weaponizing refugees and immigrants for political gain in America. The danger we are in is that if we take the stance now that refugees must be met with "Zero Tolerance" rather than with refuge, is that we will have then crossed the threshold of being complicit of a type of genocide. Because a refugee is a sort of human zombie in the political and social sense it should be a chief calling of Christians to be the vanguard of refuge. This is precisely why a place of worship is called a 'sanctuary.' The worship of the church is to be, literally, the place of refuge for the refugee. The body politic will always have strong incentives to damn the damned, to demonize and reject the refugee. The calling of the church should be to guide the conscience of the body politic, to be a moral restraint to damning the damned, to refusing refuge to the refugee. It is time for us to lift our voice and to open our churches for the act of worship that is 'sanctuary.'

The Era of Human Rights Is Ending

Why did the US leave the UN Human Rights Council? Trump has been openly telegraphing this move and the reasoning behind it for years.

The end goal of Trumpism is to end the era of human rights and international treaties/agreements. I've been harping on this for two years now because that is literally what Trump has been saying over and over again and I always take people at their word. Well, here we are. There are no non-malicious reasons to end human rights agreements. It is purely a pre-text for the rest of Trump's campaign promises: 1) To reintroduce torture 2) To strip other nations of their natural resources through military means 3) To terrorize other nations for economic gain wherever it suits our economic purposes 4) To rebalance global power away from global cooperation and into the hands of strong dictators 5) To make nuclear weapons an active threat as a part of our regular means of business 6) To reassert white male dominance and 7) To enforce mono-culturalism at a national level and to ensure mono-culturalism globally.

We are in the deepest global crisis since the late 1930's. It is time to wake up!

Where You Sit Is Where You Stand

Permanent orphans.

I know a lot of people are wondering what they can do. This is what's been percolating in my mind. The simple truth is that white Evangelical Christians have been the political force driving Trumpism. We are where we are now because this is where white Evangelical Christians have steered the ship. Watching this unfold I've been thinking a lot about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's call to end Christianity as an organized religion as the Christlike response to the failure of the church in Germany. I know this, if you belong to a congregation where this is not addressed from the pulpit on Sunday you should absolutely leave that congregation immediately. When pastors stop drawing a paycheck and elder boards wonder how they'll make the next rent payment all sorts of theology will furiously and suddenly be 'discovered.'

What's more, there are all sorts of congregations that practice a simple, humble faith. Find a congregation that worships in Spanish. Find one that is intentionally multi-cultural and where congregants are encouraged to give money to the poor with greater intensity than to the leadership or the building fund. Find a congregation that actively harbors refugee families. Find a congregation that practices what Jesus' brother called, 'True religion' - which is to say caring for those on the margins. The reason bad religion is winning right now is because far too many folks are more interested in getting along with those who practice false religion than they are in "proclaiming good news to the poor."

Here's a quote that sounds pretty revolutionary:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

It's time to choose sides. As the saying goes, "Where you sit is where you stand."

I Am a Citizen of a Nation that Puts Innocent Children in Concentration Camps

Just because something seems morally obvious (such as you shouldn't hold children and infants in concentration camps - ripped away violently from their families - for political or any other purposes) doesn't mean that society will naturally bend in that direction. Quite the opposite.

For example, when I attended Calvin Theological Seminary I wrote a lengthy paper about the editorial stance of the Christian Reformed Church's journal, "The Banner of Truth," on the rise of Hitler in Germany. I read every editorial in "The Banner of Truth" from 1932 up until Pearl Harbor in my research. I was shaken, but not overly surprised, to discover that the CRC editorial posture was that while Hitler may not have been a savory character, he was by far and away the best leader in the world (compared to the evil FDR, etc.) and so worthy of Christian support (though not a full throated endorsement). Hitler was, to use today's Christian lingo, 'God's Cyrus'.

Ultimately the editorial board changed their stance. However, there was no argument that persuaded the editorial board otherwise, no moral outrage at Hitler's use of ghettoes (an unsavory but necessary measure in their eyes), but rather a response of self-preservation and fear that changed the editorial response as it was Pearl Harbor that led them to change.

I've been asking myself for close more than two decades: how could it be that the Christian Reformed Church was (albeit reluctantly) pro-Hitler? The longer I ponder the more clear it becomes to me that moral and spiritual myopia are particularly intransigent among people who consider themselves to be good or righteous. One could reasonably argue that the central negative topic Jesus addressed in his life and teachings was the spiritual blindness of religion and the religious. (Recall, Jesus had no problem addressing the religious teachers of his day who were most adamant about conserving religious tradition and purity, 'children of Satan.')

Things don't seem to change much in terms of moral and spiritual myopia. Anyone with the slightest bit of spiritual imagination could see that the crimes against humanity that America is perpetrating today were inevitable in a Trump Presidency. Cruelty towards immigrants and people of color was the central tenet of Trumpism from the onset. What's more, the type of evil we are seeing today is completely of a piece of America's leadership as the primary developer and exporter of racialized prejudice and violence over the past few hundred years. So what's happening now is no historical aberration, it's just jolting to many of us who thought we might be able to live free of these types of moral and spiritual struggles.

The idea of trying to have a dialogue to reasonably come to an agreement together on what is morally and/or spiritually good, and how to then translate that into a peaceable society, at a time when collectively we are clouded in a daze of hatred and divisiveness, is laughable. This is a time for battle. This is a time to stand. Each generation is given the task anew to see the world as it is and to discover and cherish the sacred spark that resides in each one of the oppressed and marginalized people of the world - in our age that means, more than anyone, the refugee and the immigrant.

When you see pictures of those children and those families terrorized, held in cages like animals who do you see? For those with eyes to see each child stripped from his or her mother's arms is Jesus. Each mother is Mary. And who is King Herod? We all are. We all have blood on our hands because it's happening on our watch, in our generation. The question is this: what will you and I do about it?

BBC Report: "Trump migrant separation policy: Children 'in cages' in Texas"

Thoughts on MECFS as a Spiritual Teacher

Salvador Dali's "Skull of Zurbaran" is a profound meditation on 1) the duality of religious experience as both a stairway to the life of the divine as well as the means by which humanity enslaves itself to death and destruction and 2) mortality as the greatest teacher of spiritual truth and the doorway to divine presence. For me, it has become a metaphor for life with ME/CFS. 


One of the advantages of having an incurable illness is that, as the saying goes, I've got 'no fucks left to give'. OK, I've got a handful of fucks, but those are for my family whom I love deeply.
I have found emotional and spiritual freedom and a corresponding detachment to the 'things of this world that have grown strangely dim' that no amount of meditation, contemplation and prayer could have led me to.

I wouldn't wish #MECFS on anyone in the world. And yet, I wouldn't trade what I've learned from it for anything in the world.

Life with #MECFS is like having died, but yet remaining conscious. Living with dreams never to be fulfilled. To take a walk in the hills just one more time. To write that book that you have hundreds of pages of notes and years of research stacked up sitting there on your desk.

Life with #MECFS is a waking death, a living nightmare, endless pain and exhaustion, all invisible to everyone but those closest to you who are willing to believe you and not to shame you.

Life with #MECFS is a cruel and unrelenting teacher of limits. What will I do today, shower or cook dinner for the kids? I can't do both. Or can I? Maybe today is the day I can sneak in a shower and still cook dinner. I'll try it. I'm not that sick. Boom. #MECFS has its own ideas. I did too much again. I crash. Not hard. But I lose a whole day the next day. I sleep 16 hours. I sit on a couch when I wake. Not even the Warriors game can cheer me up.

#MECFS sings to me, "Oops. You did it again." It forces me to constantly think through my limits. Can I walk to the kitchen, 15 feet away, and get a glass of water, or will that knock me out? I hold out until I have to use the bathroom. Then I only have to get up and walk once.

But #MECFS' constant cruel teaching of limits opens me to a greater vista that can hardly be described. I can see what matters in this world with eyes that only a handful of spiritual leaders that I have known in my life (and I have known many great ones) can see.

#MECFS teaches me the foolishness of grasping. "Vanity. Vanity. It is all Vanity" as the Hebrew teacher of wisdom pointed out regarding the limits of human achievement, ambition, and even of wisdom itself.

#MECFS teaches me to cherish truth and to despise falsehoods. To give no quarter to the lies of my false self or the mask wearing of hypocrites (from the Greek word for 'actor' or 'thespian') the thin, cheep veneers of self-righteousness, performing 'goodness', and reputation.

But most of all #MECFS teaches me that spiritual reality is more real than can be taught in words - it must be experienced in love and compassion and in a fearless embrace of truth, even truth that strips one to the core, even truth that pushes you to the abyss.

It is here, at the edge of the abyss that #MECFS teaches me to hold on to love. Nothing else endures. As the Greek philosopher taught, as the Apostle John wrote, the substance of reality and of the divine realm is love. I would not trade the experience of this truth for anything. (March 8, 2018)