The Power of the Imaginative Story: Matthew (part 6)

Jesus shakes up his listeners by declaring that certain conventional and legal actions (or inactions) are not at the heart of goodness, not at the core of righteousness. He reminds them of what everyone already knows (“You have heard . . .”) and then pulls the rug out from underneath their feet by pushing them away from their perceived moral and ethical safety zones (“But I say to you . . .”). So:

Not committing murder doesn’t eradicate the internal anger that resides in one’s heart.

Not committing adultery doesn’t magically erase the objectifying of someone as a mere object of sexual desire.

Following the legal rules that allow a man to divorce his wife—thereby forcing her into a new marriage relationship in order to avoid becoming destitute—doesn’t wipe the slate of oppression clean.

These first three admonitions, while clearly not ignoring the fact that actions and thoughts do not necessarily have the same consequences (actually killing someone brings a more severe result than just thinking about murder), bring to the forefront two important emphases:

First, there resides in the human heart the potential for the worst of human actions. Therefore, all people stand together in a sea of dark possibilities. It’s one thing to make a right judgment about something, as in bearing witness to some observable event (such as, “Officer, that car made a left turn and crashed into the light pole;” or, “I saw that man strike that woman and run away with her purse”). It’s another thing to claim that the possibilities for wrongdoing and error do not exist in those of us who haven’t committed any crimes. Such a claim is at the heart of judgmentalism.

So, just because a person didn’t pull the trigger on the gun doesn’t mean that her inner anger, an anger that makes murder a possibility, has no unrighteous power.

Just because a man hasn’t cheated on his wife doesn’t mean that his constant lusting over his neighbor’s wife doesn’t have the potential to destroy lives and relationships.

Second, legal permissions and boundaries do not necessarily mirror what is truly right. In Jesus’ day, a man could divorce his wife, sometimes on flimsy grounds, as long as he gave her a certificate of divorce (most likely a legally-recognized document that freed her to marry another). To be a divorced and disempowered woman in that time would be a sure ticket to destitution. Jesus wouldn’t allow for such a legally protected action, as though the boundaries of the law eliminated the destruction that would surely follow.

I wonder how things would change for us if, when we heard that someone did something awful, rather than saying, “How could he do that?” we lamented, “I am capable of the same thing.”

I wonder how generous our hearts might become if, while respecting the reality of our national laws, we didn’t allow legal regulations to be the ultimate definers of righteousness? For example:

Do the existence of immigration laws and national borders mean that “neighbor” is defined only by the legalities of residency and citizenship?

When the courts make a declaration requiring obedience—whether related to abortion, marriage, immigration, discrimination, and any number of other important issues—is the conversation over for followers of Jesus? Or do we look to him and wait for him to say, “But I say to you . . .”?

The words of this sermon in the gospel of Matthew—typically called “The Sermon on the Mount”—have been studied, reflected upon, and cherished by people for centuries. But they are not necessarily words of comfort. They force us as readers to confront ourselves and challenge our own perceived securities.

There is a road leading down from a mountain in Mexico where I have ridden my bicycle several times. There is a big sign on the side as the road begins its winding, eight-mile descent. The sign reads, “Curvos Peligrosos.” Dangerous Curves.

There should be a heading at the beginning of this message from Jesus that reads: “Palabras Peligrosas.” Dangerous Words.

Kermit Gosnell and the Normalcy of Evil

Yesterday Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder, found guilty of killing three babies following botched late-term abortions. Prosecutors called Gosnell’s clinic a house of horrors. There will surely follow a great deal of debate about definitions of viable life, the standards of regulation of abortion clinics, and so on.

Will clearer definitions and better regulations really remove the possibility of the butchery uncovered in the Gosnell case? It took Gosnell’s employees quite some time to decide that working in filth, storing fetal body parts in jars and empty cat food cans, and snipping the spines of tiny, squirming, crying babies were bad ideas (one man claims to have done over a hundred snippings himself before his conscience felt compromised). Would a clearer understanding of legal requirements have stopped them before they obeyed their employer?

How does such evil flourish? How can it emerge in the context of a practice that has become, in our culture, so normal—or as Hannah Arendt, in her reflections on the Nazi executioner Adolph Eichmann, suggested: How can evil be so banal?

Over the last forty years or so, activism, science, and government—in a kind of legislative ménage à trois—have successfully spawned a cultural perception of normality when it comes to abortion. Sure, there are protestors in front of clinics, but the word abortion has become more ideological than a description of something real. It is the political dividing line between those claiming loyalty to the yet-to-be born, and those standing for rights of the ones who would have to give birth. It is word that is now included in our growing list of inalienable rights.

And then Gosnell shows up and makes it all real.

But we don’t want it to be real (is that why the press seemed so light on the story over the last two and a half years? Was everyone running around asking, “Is it real? Is it real?”). We have worked so hard in protecting our sensibilities by limiting our in-utero descriptions of life to terms like zygote and fetus, but certainly not baby. We seem to have agreed, overall, that it isn’t viable life until we say it is, and that would be somewhere around 21 weeks after conception.

So quit looking at that sonogram. Stop counting those fingers and toes. Ignore that fluttering butterfly that the technician said was a heartbeat. It’s not a living being. It’s not. It’s not. It’s not.

Unless someone like Dr. Gosnell successfully pulls a few fetuses into the light of day and their labels are magically changed to babies.

Kermit Gosnell is such a benign name. It isn’t a Hannibal Lector name that would automatically conjure of images of horror. It’s almost a warm and fuzzy name because it is shared with one of our favorite frogs. It’s very, very normal, just like the word scissors. With scissors we cut out paper dolls and remove tightly-wound strands of ribbons from wrapped gifts. We also use them, it appears, to sever the spines of tiny babies. After all, seconds earlier, they were only fetuses. Is there a 5-second rule on this?

Critics of Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, argue that evil does not spring from passive, ignorant people blindly following the orders of their evil leaders; they say it comes from regular, everyday people becoming immersed in evil ideologies, and then acting in accord with those ideologies. Perhaps they are correct.

The Gosnell case has caused me to think anew about how we determine good and evil. If it is by legislation, then we can act morally (does that word even have a definition?) only to the degree that our legislators and judges inform us. At what point do we look around and examine our normals and discover that we’ve adopted a received morality and have slowly cooked in its cultural juices, like little Kermits in a kettle?

There are certain clues that should tip us off here. When various groups begin redefining our terminologies for us, we should put up our anttenae of suspicion. When pressure on legislators results in our lines of morality being shifted, we should ask a few questions.

In the 19th century, there were a number of state and federal supreme court cases related to slavery, several of which declared imported Africans to be under full control of their owners. One case denied protection under the constitution for those slaves and any of their descendants.

We’re all probably happy that someone challenged those views of normalcy. What the law seemed incapable of doing was ultimately accomplished by people with a moral compass.

Sometimes, when our courts rule and slaves are freed, women given equal legal status with men and so on, we might find that our so-called normals really did need to be shifted. But not always. And never without examination.

I’ve referenced this text of Scripture before, but I feel compelled to do it again:

Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you . . .” (Matthew 20:25-26)

When our leaders and the powerful lobbies that influence them inform us about what is good and right and legal, is the conversation over for we who follow Jesus? And I’m not only speaking of abortion (clearly that debate has never abated), but of questions regarding immigration, human trafficking, economic policies, and a number of others. Or, is there a point where we look beyond the lines of legislation and declare,

It will not be so among us.

On Abortion and Artificial Categories

I appreciated Rachel Held Evens thoughtful post regarding her evolving views regarding abortion. It continues to be a difficult and painful debate (it is rarely a conversation, and I appreciate Rachel’s attempts at civil discourse), especially with the recent discovery of the horrors inside Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic.

As the Gosnell case unfolded, I began thinking how the arguments for “ pro-choice” (which have actually devolved into arguments that are “pro-abortion”) have successfully altered the public perception of life by segmenting and depersonalizing the early stages of human life in order to turn the discussion to things abstract and legally categorical.

So, zygotes, embryos and fetuses end up having little or no relationship to the human beings that will emerge at birth. It’s a handy way to win the argument, and it has been fairly successful in the western world in altering people’s thinking about the acceptability of abortion.

How do we who follow Jesus respond to this? Christians are not unified on the subject. We easily fall into the same public categories of pro-life and pro-choice, the former being conservative, the latter progressive.

The securing of victory for pro-choice proponents has been found in the law. The law has offered legality to the practice of abortion even while setting boundaries to the timing of the procedure—boundaries that are often pushed.

Christians have faced off with both abortion and infanticide in the past. In the earliest years of the emerging Christian movement, one Christian writer highlighted the common cultural practice of abandoning unwanted infants outside the city limits where they would either die of exposure or be killed by wild animals. He indicated that neither Jews nor Christians discarded their children that way, and were even known to rescue abandoned babies and take them into their own families.

Until the late fourth century, infanticide was an accepted practice in both Greek and Roman societies. But there was a technicality: To avoid actually committing murder, the unwanted infant would be left out in the wilderness, where it would either die of exposure (a natural process) or be rescued by the gods or a kind traveler. One defender of the faith remarks:

“First of all, you [pagans] expose your children, so that they may be taken by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown!” Tertullian (c. 197, W) 3.26.

His response to his pagan detractor? We don’t do that.

We’ve created a lot of technicalities in our culture as well. We have legal lines that we think offer us protection and justification. That might work in the public square, but it shouldn’t work for we who follow Jesus. There’s an artificiality to that perceived safety zone that is proven every time the law is changed. The law of the land may be important, but it often speaks more about majority preference than it does ethics and morals (for example, in the mid-1800’s, the Supreme Court ruled that states were able to enslave human beings imported from the southern hemisphere. We’re all probably glad that there were people who claimed that the law didn’t speak for them).

Rather than thinking about human life (or any life, for that matter) as a series of disconnected phases, I prefer to think of life as a unified trajectory that starts with conception. There is an inevitability to the cellular creation that we call a zygote: It’s destiny is to emerge into the light of day and become present to the world.

And, for we who follow Jesus, we might also say that such a life is intended to affirm and nurture the life it encounters in the world. If we are going to use the term “pro-life,” then it ought to relate to more than the denial of the practice of abortion. It should relate to how we view war, capital punishment, and poverty for starters.

I’ve spoken of this before in relation to gay marriage. If we fall into the pre-created categories of discourse that come to us from the public square, then we stop short of thoughtful theological reflection on issues of tremendous importance. We in the church seem to be particularly short on that kind of reflection these days.

O Lord, make haste to help us.

Ministry and Sin

When I was serving as a full-time pastor, people would occasionally apologize to me for using course language in my presence. Those apologies always amused me, since I am a veteran of the US Navy and have within me the ability to cuss with words that are better imagined than described. I have come to find swearing to be more amusing than offensive.

There’s this thing that people have with Christians in general and ministers in particular: We’re supposed to be shocked by sinful stuff and don’t want to get any of it on us. But the truth is, while we don’t want to be defined and formed by actions and thoughts that veer us away from God, we’re generally pretty cognizant of our own sin (even though we, like most people, tend to overlook some of our sins in favor of others). On top of that, all Christian ministry is engagement with sin.

All of it. Every &#%$ bit of it.

If sin is, as the Bible suggests, missing the mark, straying from the right path and, in general, forgetting about God, then sin is the context for all ministry.

In seeking to minister the healing love and touch of Jesus Christ in a broken and hurting world, we cannot avoid engaging with the sin that wracks the lives of human beings. And, in doing so, we can’t help but come away with blood on our hands, complicit with those whose lives are torn by the sin they have embraced and the sin that has been inflicted upon them. The sinner and the sinned against—those are our people.

For example: I believe that divorce is wrong. All the time. Every time. Without exception. Yet, I have counseled people to file for divorce when abuse and abandonment have destroyed what was once declared to be a marriage. I not only counseled those people to enter into the tragic and broken place of divorce, but I have also gone with them, providing what support I could. I didn’t tell them that divorce, for them, was to be a good thing and that they had followed all the biblical rules for divorcing. I told them that, together, we would be entering in a tragic place and would rely on God’s mercy, forgiveness, and grace to meet us on the other side.

For example: I believe that abortion is wrong. All the time. Every time. Without exception. But if someone’s daughter or granddaughter had become pregnant as the result of rape, or her life was significantly at risk because of the impending birth, I would give consideration to abortion, and would stand by the person should the decision be made to terminate the pregnancy. I would not call the abortion “good.” I would know that I was joining in on a willing journey into sin, crying out for God’s forgiveness as we made a painful and tragic choice.

For example: I believe that the laws of the land should be observed and obeyed. But if I were still serving as a pastor and an undocumented worker (code for illegal alien) came to my church, I would offer a safe place. I would not contact the authorities. And I would be a law-breaker. But the law of God’s universal love for humanity would trump my allegiance to the legal system. And if the authorities showed up one day to haul off the worker in cuffs, they would have to bring an extra pair for me. My sheltering of the stranger in the name of Jesus would not shield me from complicity.

Ministry draws us into close proximity to sin. It also brings us in close proximity to Jesus, who is already at work in the most broken, suffering parts of human life.

Jesus—the one called the Friend of Sinners. The one with our blood on his hands.

Christians of the Agenda

CNN ran a recent story titled "Progressive group starts training pro-abortion rights religious leaders."

This causes me to think, once again, how Christians are coming to be defined in the US. We seem to be viewed as people of various agendas.

We're all about abortion and contraception - on one side or the other.

We're all about immigration - how to keep people out or in.

We're all about nailing down the true American way - as various forms of either conservative or progressive.

(On that note: What exactly is it that we wish to conserve? Is everything worth conserving? And what does it mean to be progressive? What "progresses" people? What are people progressing from, and toward, and by what power?)

If I remember correctly, we are to be people of the Spirit of God, called to be his people for the sake, blessing, and reconciliation of the world. We are called to proclaim and demonstrate the reality of the kingdom of God. We are to be branded with the name of Jesus, living as people willing to drink his cup and submit to his baptism. I think all that's in the Bible somewhere.

People of the Spirit? or People of the Agenda?