Our Historical God & America’s Historical Challenges
By Philip E. Wheaton
Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-11, 20; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:29-39
           
While in Nicaragua, I was given a book about our historical God written by a U.S.-Nicaraguan Baptist theologian by the name of Jorge Pixley, well-known in Latin American theological circles, entitled The Liberating God of the Bible. Professor Pixley called the fifth chapter of his book in Spanish “An Historical God Is A God Who Loses His Innocence.” I love this phrase for two reasons: first, because it introduces us to the historical God of the Old Testament before we meet the historical Jesus of the New Testament; and, secondly, because this God of history makes it clear that we really don’t know the fulness of God outside of this historical context except through intuition, that is, by speculating about the vastness of the galaxy, the marvels of Mother Nature and our intimations on immortality in response to our human finiteness and ephemeral temporality.

In my exegesis on the biblical texts assigned to us for today, this Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, the issue of this historical God comes into sharp relief in contrast to the nature of God as infinitely other, pure and perfect compared to the muck and morass of human history with all its earthly absurdities and human limitations. This Epiphany season began with the Light of God coming into the world in the birth of Jesus but ends ignominiously with Jesus dying upon the Cross. One is struck by the fact that all the lessons over the past four Sundays used the same texts: the Hebrew prophets, the 1st Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians and the gospel of Mark. This means that these texts are integrally interlinked. Each homilist from this period has given us a unique interpretation of these texts. John highlighted forgiveness (Jonah refusing to forgive the Ninevites and Yahweh demanding he must do so). Gail warned us if we continue abusing Mother Nature we face catastrophic nutritional deprivation. My focus today is on two seemingly obtuse subjects: how we feed our idols and how the demons recognized Jesus as the Messiah.

In each case, are three of us were trying to encourage this humble community of ours to think hard about these contradictions because they portend disastrous consequences for the future. Behind each of our individual perspectives lay two similar but related questions: first, Who is God?, and secondly, What are we human beings supposed to be actually doing? The answer for us, brothers and sisters, doesn’t rest with Heaven but depends upon what we do here in history, where we are faced in ordinary life by transcendental problematics, as we say in Spanish, huge conundrums that must be resolved pragmatically. If we choose not to change we will only hasten our decline into military, political, fiscal and moral degradation. Even more unsettling is the fact we don’t have very much time left; we are already facing catastrophic crises.

In our text from Isaiah for today, we find a hyperbolic shift back and forth between this perfect God whom we scarcely know, who is called Elohim, and the God we know so well, call Yahweh, the God of history. Consider these starkly different metaphors about these two Gods.

“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain...” [beyond which we cannot see, and yet]; One “who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of this world as nothing...” [astounding contrasts... and again, in these phrases from Psalm 147 for today]:

“Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond all measure...”

And in contrast: “The Lord lifts up the downtrodden; he casts the wicked to the ground.”

About this other God, this perfect, pure, all-powerful and most holy God, we know very little. One writer describes this contrast thusly: an “irresistible numinous that is historically superfluous.” In other words, Elohim has no historical task, but is simply to be worshiped and adored. By contrast, the Bible is all about creating a practical utopia, building the kingdom of God on earth. This is why biblical history begins with Yahweh calling Moses to be the first prophet, that is, called him to challenge Pharaoh; to demand that he liberate the Hebrew people from bondage. This highlights the fact that the prophetic precedes the legalistic; the Word came before the Law and thus the Torah, although meaning law, became the Covenant which included both the Law and the Prophets. The difference between Hebrew priests and Hebrew prophets is that the former concentrated on the adoration of Elohim whereas the Yahweh engaged in human history by unmasking the powers in order to liberate the people from oppression.

What does this mean for us humans who are born, live and die in history? It means we can create and we can also destroy. We can tell the truth or we can lie. We can change history for the better or take it down into ruin. In other words, we are free to choose. This is our hope and this is our curse. And this is why nations and empires rise and fall. They are always extremely creative and extremely destructive. Thus history is marked by beginnings and end-times... and we are very close to the end-time of this particular age, not because we are being threatened by some outside enemy, like the terrorists in the Middle East but because of our own doings and undoings; through our own wars; our own financial corruption; our own political deceit. After eight years of the Bush regime, the American people sensed that something was rotten in the State of America and so we rejected both the Republican and Democratic parties, that is, both McCaan and Clinton, and we voted for a man because he promised to change things in terms of our bad ways of life.

What was so sad about Obama’s rejection of his mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was that Rev. Wright didn’t nuance his words but expressed his fury openly by saying “God damn America.” It was a poor choice of words, but not inaccurate. Yet, both John and Gail warned us, in very different terms, about the extremity of our crisis today. They both said we have to change fundamentally or we will perish. John warned us: Forgive the Ninivites or Die! and Gail said Feed the Poor or Perish! Like Rev. Wright they, too, were warning that things are bad in America.

The question is: but what does this say to us about who God is? The texts are clear: the perfect, all-powerful Elohim won’t intervene; and our historical suffering God Yahweh says : it’s up to us.

In the Epistle from 1st Corinthians last Sunday we heard the phrase “knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” Paul was talking about “eating food offered to idols.” That was from chapter 8. In today’s epistle, in chapter 9 of First Corinthians, Paul writes: “To the weak, I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. –1st Cor 9:22

What these words mean is critically important to all religions — beware the Ides of March — that is, religious fundamentalism, the great idolatry of all religions whose members love religion more than the prophetic word. Both Paul and Jesus rejected religious fundamentalism: Paul rejected the Pharisees’ legalism and Jesus rejected the Priests sacrifices offered to idols. We can see this fundamentalistic tendency in the Western crusades fostered by the Papacy whose goal it was to destroy the infidel Turks and Muslims; conversely, the Turks and Muslims set out to destroy the Crusaders because they were seen as evil infidels from the West. In an article in the Washington Post this past week about a so-called Catholic bishop named Richard Williamson, there was a reference back to the 1930s when both the Lutheran and Catholic Churches tolerated Hitler’s anti-Semitism in order to protect their own religious well-being. A Vatican official back then said: “Charity is well and good but the greatest charity is not to make problems for the church.” This is religious fundamentalism: extolling religion but denying the Gospel.

When Paul said that “knowledge can puff one up, but love builds one up ,” he was referring to the use of theology to lord it over others who are uneducated or have less knowledge of God. This is always a clerical temptation: the tendency of any priest or pastor because he knows more than those who haven’t been to seminary to denigrate the laity. This tendency in Church history began from early on, at the turn of the first century, when gnosticism (gnosis or knowledge) became the chief criteria of the Early Church. Paul, of course, had an abundance of theological knowledge, but he knew that the Gospel wasn’t based upon wisdom but upon foolishness: the foolishness of the Cross. As he wrote in his first chapter to the 1st Corinthians: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” The Cross implies defeat and death because it challenged the world’s assumptions of the kingdom as power and glory. When Jesus died on the Cross, many Jews abandoned the idea he was the messiah because he died in infamy. He hadn’t defeated the Romans, the Romans had destroyed him. So how could Jesus possibly be the Messiah if the hated imperialists had nailed him to a cross: pure foolishness!

But what did Paul mean when he spoke about “offering food to idols?” What are the principle idols of our Empire? The answer is simple: war and profits. These the cornerstones of America the powerful. Through our wars we conquer other nations in order to get a hold of their gold or oil while the goal of Wall Street and the Hedge funds is to make profit off gambling. The flaw in these imperialist values–gambling on wars and betting on the market–is that neither has any morality; they don’t a damn about people, or about nature, or even about the future of our democracy; they only care about wealth and power. So our crisis is this: if we Americans only want domestic change but continue to cling to wars and profits, we are finished as a nation. The irony is that We the People hate war and we care for people; but we also love war and adore our money. Every red-blooded American loves profits, because it you buy anything you want. So we feed these idols; even though they squander our enormous wealth and destroy millions of people. This is the dichotomy threatening our nation, so we have to choose to change or we will die.

In the Gospel for today from the first chapter of Mark, Jesus focuses upon a strange idiom, on a man with an unclean spirit who knew who Jesus was, whereas the ordinary people back then, including his own disciples, were just asking and guessing about who he might be. But the crazies... they knew who Jesus was! What does that mean? In answer to Gail’s homily last week about the importance of the earth, people in Latin America used to say that only two classes know the value of land: the very poor and the very rich. Not the middle class. That is, farmers and peasants know, because they live off the soil, harvesting corn and beans; and the rich know because they live off the production of coffee and copper found in their vast land holdings. On the other hand, the urban middle class lives off their wages and they buy their food at the corner store or in a supermarket... so they don’t care about the land, which implies hard work. They only care about their home and family. In times of extreme crisis in Latin America, and this has happened many times, middle class folks just split and leave their own country; they move to a safer environment, come to America, because they have money and don’t care about the land.

But what about the crazies, how did they know who Jesus was? They listened to his prophetic words about another way, a better life, where everyone shared. And since they were outcasts, weirdos, they realized they might benefit from this new order of things. But, they were also afraid because they were the victims of the rich and powerful; they were afraid that such a change would completely upset the status quo and that might threaten their extremely tenuous situation as nobodies who might become the target of good citizens. They knew as Bob Dylan sang: “the times, they are a-changin.’” This is why the Alliance for Progress under John F. Kennedy failed, because the rich elites in Latin America were not about to allow a change into greater democracy. And that is also why Kennedy was assassinated by the powers because he was going to change things; he was going to end the war in Vietnam. And this is why Jesus called told his disciples not to use the term messiah because he knew the authorities would freak out and come and kill him. As our text says: “he cast out many demons; but he wouldn’t let them speak, because they knew him.” It’s called Jesus’ “messianic secret.” And it;’s our secret, too. We Christians are crazies too, because we know how radical the Gospel is, and that it was meant to change the status quo. These Epiphany texts were all about the coming of radical change; that is, to prepare us to understand Jesus’ passion and why the powers had to kill him: to prevent change. Obama’s slogan “I believe in change” struck a common note for millions of us. But many Americans still believe we can return to good old days, to our powerful means and affluent ways by making only a few changes and restoring things to the way it was. We Americans have forgotten the warning of our prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr., when he asked: “Where Do We Go from Here?” He said:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late... We still have a choice today: non-violent co-existence or violent co-annihilation. This may be mankind’s last chance between chaos and community. – A Testament of Hope, p. 632-663