One of my difficulties preparing sermons this Lent is the tendency in the Old Testament lessons to emphasize conquest of the land. As a friend once said, who-was-here-first bickering tends to pit the 5th civilization against the 7th civilization. We learned another way to go from our local guide in Canyon de Chelly. He explained that first there were the Ancient ones, then the ancestral Pueblo, then the Hopi, "then we came along - the Diné …"
Or as a writer in the Smithsonian magazine tells it, “the Archaic people, who inhabited these lands from 2500 B.C. to 200 B.C…the Basketmaker people between 200 B.C. and A.D. 750... the Ancestral Pueblo people, who dwelled here between A.D. 750 and 1300… the Hopi farmed in the valley seasonally from the 1300s to the 1600s, and the Hopi and the Pueblos still maintain their ties to the site today. Since the early 1700s, the Diné people have lived in the canyon…”
In either telling there is a sensitivity to the progression of peoples who have lived in the same place.
And to be fair the Museum of Israel teaches by artifact something of the same lesson. The earliest traces of human habitation going back 17 thousand years do not tell the story of any of the historical peoples of the land, however long their memories.
What these examples do tell us matches with what I learned 11 years ago in a lecture entitled ‘migration spirituality’ - people move; that is what we do. Sometimes unhappy collisions or emigrations or flight, from a reign of terror or a tremendous crisis in the natural environment, from war, civil strife, natural disaster, political oppression, crime, pestilence, or any of the plagues visited upon Pharaoh in the story of the Exodus.
And that brings us back to the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament of the King James Version, and how the books of the Torah, the Pentateuch, and early historical books, highlight the process of infiltration, conquest, assimilation, and nation formation, that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges, narrate for us.
Do we see a triumphant progress as the incoming Hebrew people take over from earlier people the ‘promised’ land? Do we see a pattern of conquest? Do we see ourselves?
Do we see ourselves as inheritors, or supercessionist conquerors, replacing and erasing earlier - so obviously less God-favored - people?
And if the favored people of God, ancient Hebrews or modern Christian nationalists, are right - is it because of might, or right behavior? Certainly the latter is lacking – unless of course you feel you are anointed for this very purpose. You know what? I’d doubt it.
The challenge for most of us is not some extreme political theology, or self-justifying self-dealing: it is the easy fault to fall into, of thinking of our way of worshipping God as supplanting those of others. It is easy to judge. It is hard to learn from strangers.
Especially if you think they are wrong, or that God has commanded you not to spare even one of them. This sounds like genocide. And that is not the God of love we know.
Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindus, Jain, Sikh, Shinto, animist, unbeliever, all know and serve, at their best, a higher principle, a better way of being.
We Americans so proudly wave the flag of the bill of rights, passed in the early days of our republic and ratified by the states; but there is a later document, from an organization then chaired by a first lady of the United States, the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. It is the universal declaration of human rights. Whatever its details it goes beyond the 18th century Enlightenment individualism and balance of power, and the emphasis on civil freedom, that the founders of our democracy bequeathed to us. And it came out of a terrible crucible.
Perhaps there is progress in humankind after all. It is a peculiar kind of progress. It is not linear. Perhaps it bends like an arc, toward justice.
And maybe like Jerry Garcia’s description of his own band, human progress is a forlorn and humble thing, an awkward bumble bee, bumping into things, flying on one wing… but getting there, getting there, and making music along the way. And maybe, like Bill Graham’s description of that same band, the people who strive for democracy are not the best at what they do, they are the only ones that do what they do.
Democracy, quipped Winston Churchill or Mark Twain or my mom, is not the best form of government until you have tried all the others. Maybe human kindness is not the quickest way to sudden success, but it is, after you have tried all the others, the way forward to the day we live together in peace and charity, with liberty and justice for all.
The beginning of wisdom lies in knowledge of our own folly, and then forgiveness.
(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/canyon-of-the-ancestors-180985955/)
(https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/eleanor-roosevelt-and-the-united-nations)
(https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights)
Toward the Second Sunday in Lent
Psalm 27 Dominus illuminatio mea
https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent2_RCL.html
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030127/
http://edgeofenclosure.org/lent2c.html
JRL+
No comments:
Post a Comment