The Idolatrous Worship of God.

Facebook is generally a very bad place for the exchange of ideas that rise much above the level of idle chatter.

I don’t want to be misunderstood: I like FB. Facebook is fun—people post funny cartoons, travel photos, cute puppy videos, little inspirational posters, right-wing rants, left wing rants, and non-wing rants—and some of this stuff is actually interesting and rewarding. Without FB, friends and acquaintances I had known years ago would have been lost to me forever. I have been surprised and gratified to learn that people remember me kindly and to realize that many people I didn’t much like “back in the day” turned out all right after all. And one of the most powerful messages I ever received came via FB, a shared inspirational quotation (from whom, I do not know) that said: “Be kind. Every person you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” A pithy reminder to love my neighbor as I wish to love myself.

Having acknowledged the pleasures I have derived, however, I have to say that if you’re looking on Facebook for the kind of live exchange that increases your understanding of humankind, the nature of God, and God’s relationship to humankind, you’re going to be disappointed. That sort of exchange is just not what most people go on FB for, and I doubt that it was ever designed for that sort of deep, “meaningful” exchange anyway.

Not that I don't keep trying. I’m always posting something provocative or “serious” and I’ll get—maybe—a few “likes” and—maybe—a brief comment or two. Frustrating. Or, sometimes, I'll post a link to my latest blog entry—now there’s an exercise in humility. My blog posts, most (not all) of which I really labor over and, I think, are at least worth reading, are just flatly and not-quite tee totally ignored. (I have a blog follower—I don’t know who and I don’t want to know—and not even my follower reads me!. Why go to the trouble of signing up as a follower if you’re not going to follow?) I don’t know if it’s me (in darker moments, I just know that people aren’t interested in what I have to say because they loathe me) or if people get home after work and just want to relax and not have their brains overly engaged or if it’s something else. I’ll never know, because there’s no way I could ever approach someone and say, “Hey! Why don’t you read my blog?”

Today, however, I enjoyed an interesting exchange. The Progressive Christian Alliance (one of the groups I “like”) posted the following: “God is our comforter, redeemer, husband, mother, fortress, father, provider, shepherd, and teacher. When you think of God, what do you see?” The responses ran from “sta-puf marshmallow man” to “Hands holding me safely, keeping me warm, guiding me, no matter what happens. I just have to be aware of the presence.”

So, after 490 words (by Microsoft Word count), I reach the real subject of my blog entry. I have been reading a lot about the emerging church movement, especially Peter Rollins, lately, and I’ve been struck by Christian Wiman’s book, My Bright Abyss, as well. Their ideas about God coincide, to agree, with some things I’ve read by Thomas Merton. I’ve learned enough to show how ignorant I am, but I think I’ve picked up a few gems along the way.

My response to the question was this (not an exact quotation): God is incomprehensible, beyond language and ideologies (doctrines). It is counterproductive to try to distill him into one image, or a set of images, or into even a set of beliefs. Images and ideologies are boxes, and, no matter how beautiful a box or it’s contents may be, God doesn’t exist in boxes. Ideologies exist in boxes. And when we create an ideology about God or an image of God we begin to worship the ideology or the image—not the God who transcends ideologies and images. In other words, we are worshipping the golden calf; we are committing the sin of idolatry. I think the closest we can come to describing God with language is to admit that he is indescribable, but also he is there.

Someone responded to me by saying (again, not an exact quotation): “And yet, ideas and words are the only way we have of communicating ideas about God.”

How utterly wrong that statement is! I minored in Interpersonal Communication (in the Speech & Drama Department) as an undergraduate, so I’ve had some exposure to this: there are far more ways—and better, more reliable ways—to communicate about God than by the mere use of language. (There was some saint—St. Francis?—who once said, “Preach the Gospel continuously. [Only] if necessary, use words.”) Nonverbal communication conveys vastly more information about matters of the heart and spirit than words ever can. Matters of the heart and spirit—and god is, if nothing else, surely a matter of the heart and spirit—are simply not subject to quantitative analysis or “reasonable” deconstruction (I have no idea whether I’m using that word correctly). The facts of God and Christ—and I believe they are facts—are not the sort of facts that are subject to analysis and proof by the scientific method (which, by the way, is why those poor spiritually crippled rationalists who cannot conceive of a world outside their senses become atheists). Too, neither God nor Christ can be defined in words, no matter how polished, reasoned, or eloquent, though some of the best minds in history have tried.

So, I know nothing about God save that I can never know him, and I celebrate that uncertainty as part of my faith. But I can say this: the simple act of sitting quietly in the dark with a friend who is in pain, just holding their hand, conveys more about God’s nature and presence with us than all the volumes written by Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Rudolph Bultmann.

Idea in Progress; Forgive my Unsophistication

I believe God exists because we need him to exist. There is an inseparable bond between things and the need for things. Nature does not create a need unless there is something to satisfy it. If there were no such thing as food, we would never get hungry. If there were no such thing as light, we wouldn't have eyes. If sound did not exist, we wouldn't have ears. But light exists, otherwise we would never need to see. Sound exists; otherwise we would never need to hear. Food exists; otherwise we would never get hungry. Similarly, God exists; otherwise we would not have this burning hunger to know him; we would never have developed this deep sense of yearning for both immanence and transcendance.

Do we pay taxes...or not?

 

My second-favorite story about Jesus (after the story of his meeting with the Syro-Phoenician woman) appears in my favorite Gospel—Mark’s. It goes like this:

"Then [Jesus’ Pharisaic enemies] sent to him some of the Pharisees and the Herodians, to catch him in his words. When they had come, they said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are true and care about no one; for you do not regard the person of men, but teach the way of God in truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not. Shall we pay, or shall we not pay?” But he, knowing their hypocrisy said to them, “Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius that I may see it.” So they brought it. And he said to them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.” And Jesus answered and said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” And they marveled at him."

Mark, 12:13-17 NKJV

If nothing else, Jesus was a master rhetorician with the inborn ability to employ—seemingly off the cuff—sophisticated and subtle arguments. In this he surpassed by far the abilities of all those members of the well-educated and urbane one percent who dared match wits with him. The Gospels are riddled with exchanges like this that illustrate Jesus’ true genius: the ability to turn the tables, to turn his enemies’ words against them, to avoid rhetorical traps with ease.

Everybody knows about the awful tax burden imposed on the Judean peasant and artisan classes in the Ancient Near East. I have no need to go into detail about how—even more than today—the tax system was used to impose poverty on the lower classes, to keep them dirt-poor, to enrich Imperial Rome, the priestly caste, and those other Judeans who grew fat collaborating with it, and to feed an insatiable war machine. Everybody knows how Imperial Rome dealt with dissent and disobedience. Everybody knows how subservient Judea was and how the vast majority of the population hated the Occupation and those who collaborated with it.

So here came Jesus, the champion of those very persons most wounded by Rome. His popularity was rising fast, and the buzz around him was threatening to become a Movement. Something had to be done to derail the Jesus Train, and, as in the final seconds of an old-time movie serial, the Roman collaborators forced Jesus to the edge of a cliff from which there was seemingly no escape. They thought they had him. They thought they would destroy either Jesus’ person or his credibility in one fell swoop with their flattery and their incendiary question: “Shall we pay, or shall we not pay?”

Even if you haven’t listened to more than a score of Protestant sermons, you know Jesus’ dilemma. The story has become a part of the fabric of Western Civilization, so much so that even most atheists are well familiar with it. If Jesus answers “don’t pay,” he gets crucified by the Romans for sedition, probably by sundown; if he answers “pay up,” he loses all credibility with the very class that he has come to champion. He will become, in their eyes, just another collaborator. Either way, his ministry is finished.

If he was hooked on the horns of a dilemma, about to go over the cliff, at the end of reel 5, everybody knows how our hero miraculously escaped and triumphed at the beginning of reel 6. He gave his interlocutors the answer that confirmed his genius, confounded his interlocutors, and helped cement his position as the best hope of the common people. He provided the answer that has been used for two thousand years as justification for docilely paying taxes to support an unjust system. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” But I don't think Jesus was advocating providing support to an illegitimate occupying power—not at all.

Just as the Pharisees and Herodians thought, Jesus was a rebel and agitator—not just against the religious establishment of the time, but against Rome itself. But I don't think he wanted to be executed for being a revolutionary or to atone for our sins, or for any other reason. I think what Jesus wanted more than anything was to see Judea free of Rome and free of a religious establishment that—just as in the time of Jeremiah and Isaiah—had a stranglehold on the land. He preached a revolutionary message from the beginning to the end. And he preached a revolutionary message when he talked about taxes on that day.

But how to preach that message without being carried off to his execution? The answer is simple: he spoke in code. On the surface, he said nothing objectionable to the politico-religious authorities: how could fault be found with one who openly advocated paying taxes (“the things that are Ceasar's”) to Rome? Too, how could one object to something that the priests learned in Theology 101: things that belong to God should be given to God?

Why didn't Jesus' followers turn on him when he seemed to be telling them to pay taxes to Rome? It doesn't matter what he said about giving God his due. There's no way around it; whatever else he may have said, he did say, “pay your taxes.” So why didn't the Pharisees' strategy work? Why didn't Jesus lose all credibility?

Because the people Jesus was really taking to understood the code. They understood in ways that the priestly caste, the nobility, the lawyers, and the Romans never could. Those who grew fat off the labor of the peasant and artisan class thought the system was completely legitimate, so they didn't get it--the message sailed right over their heads. But Jesus was not speaking to them: he was speaking to the rabble, and the rabble got the message. They knew—just as Jesus knew—that the Roman Occupation was unjust and totally illegitimate. They knew that property does not become one’s own if it is stolen, and they knew that every last denarius, jug of wine, bunch of olives, bolt of cloth, and hour of labor the Romans and their collaborators extracted from Judea was the proceeds of theft. Nothing in Judea, in other words, belonged to Caesar. Everything belonged to God. “Let him with ears to hear listen!” said Jesus, and his followers heard the message loud and clear: “Hell, no. Don’t give the tax collectors a nickel.” That is why the rabble didn't turn on Jesus, that day.

Here endeth the sermon.