Last week in my Greek class during break, I was talking to a friend, when from across the room, I heard a fellow say quite loudly, "Of course I'm not watching the Oscars!!! What straight guy, who isn't forced to watch it with his wife, would ever watch the Oscars!!!" This fellow was evidently single (and, I'm sure, will make one heck of a minister someday).

I didn't speak up, since I was in a conversation, but I am a straight guy who LOVES the Oscars. I have for years. Me and my sister watch it and quite enjoy doing so.

I enjoyed watching it again this year, over at my sister's place with several friends.

My favorite moment of the night:

You see, my sister and I usually do not just watch the Oscars. We usually always do our ballots, too, beforehand, and then the Oscars are a competition. We were busy this year, though, and didn't get around to making out our ballots, so no competition. Neither of us was overly distressed at this break in tradition.

Our friend Em, however, did seem a little bothered when she saw that Kalyn and I weren't keeping score this year, after doing so for so long. She, slighly flustered I guess, said, "I think this is bothering me more than you. It's like the world doesn't make sense anymore." That idea sort of bothered me for some reason.

So, I thought for a moment and eventually said, "I guess the only thing more constant in this life than Pierces keeping tradition is Pierces forgetting things." It was true, and all seemed right with the world.

from Thomas Traherne's "The Centuries of Meditations"

The First Century, 91

O Jesu, Lord of Love and Prince of Life! who even being dead, art greater than all angels, cherubims. and men, let my love unto Thee be as strong as Death and so deep that no waters may be able to drown it. O let it be ever endless and invincible! O that I could really so love Thee, as rather to suffer with St. Anselm the pains of Hell than to sin against Thee. O that no torments, no powers in heaven or earth, no stratagems, no allurements might divide me from Thee. Let the length and breadth and height and depth of my love unto Thee be like Thine unto me. Let undrainable fountains, and unmeasurable abysses be hidden in it. Let it be more vehement than flame, more abundant than the sea, more constant than the candle in Aaron's tabernacle that burned day and night. Shall the sun shine for me; and be a light from the beginning of the world to this very day that never goeth out, and shall my love cease or intermit, O Lord, to shine or burn? O let it be a perpetual fire on the altar of my heart, and let my soul itself be Thy living sacrifice.

Hope and Doom and Stuff, Part I

I doubt this will be compelling reading for many people, but a couple of people seemed interested. These are actually a couple of little pieces I wrote for a class last semester. I’m not really sure what the class thought of them. We posted one per week for everyone to read, and each person, the whole semester, would get two are three comments, or more, per post. At the end of the semester, each student in the class had received at least fifteen comments, and most people had twenty-five or thirty or more. All except for me, of course. Altogether, my posts received two comments the whole semester. I’m not sure why that happened. I asked the professor once what he thought, and (without using quite these words) the answer he gave was that there must not be very many people in the class who liked me. I had just thought that the posts weren’t any good. I’m not sure, though, what really happened. It is highly likely that these are utter crap.

Both of these posts were in response to reading some of the Hebrew Bible prophets, and they’re not exactly essays. They’re responses to a series of questions from the professor, which I put in bold. You should probably read this one first; the second is below. Enjoy.

Based on your reading of Amos and the other material for this course, how does the juxtaposition of hope and doom influence the reader (ancient Israelite or today's) to think about (1) the interaction between God and Israel, (2) the nature of grace and divine demand, (3) moral reflection on justice in society? How do hope and condemnation relate to each other, if they do? What implications might there be for us today given the shaping of this oracle?

“Be joyful,/Though you have considered all the facts.” Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Cornel West makes a useful distinction between optimism and hope. For him, “Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good.” Hope, on the other hand, “enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequalities, group xenophobia, and personal despair. […] Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane-and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair and yet never to allow despair to have the last word.” In this sense, hope is somewhat absurd because humans (both in our time and in that of the prophets) have little basis for optimism. It takes a lot of faith to be hopeful.

The Hebrew prophets aren’t optimists, but their vision does seem to me, essentially, to be hopeful. This is where doom comes in. The prophets spend significant effort proclaiming doom. Collins goes says of Amos that he does not “dilute his oracles of judgment with any glimmer of hope.” The prophets denounce the nations and Israel for a lack of justice and for a general lack of humanity, and the consequence for these failures is destruction. What’s important is that these prophesies of doom are based upon a vision of cosmic order. Ongoing human misery and future destruction are signs that humans have failed to realize the transcendent purpose demanded by the God of creation.

So, paradoxically, the pronouncement of doom simultaneously produces in the reader an intense awareness (1) of the chaos of a world marked by human misery and (2) of a cosmic force that is not indifferent to this plight. Thus, the doom of the prophets, in declaring the presence of a cosmic order, affirms a basis for faith, which in turn provides a basis for hope, which in turn provides the basis for just living (or, you might could say, for love).

So, the hopeful ending of Amos (and moments of consolation in all of the prophetic works) is, in a sense, absurd. There is little obvious evidence in either the world or in the previous portions of Amos to suggest a positive conclusion. The hope and the grace exhibited here is definitely surprising. In another sense, though, such an ending also seems inevitable. The clearly evident doom makes possible hope (with which it exists in a dialectical relationship), since it presents a God who cares. As Graham Greene once said, “The opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference.” The God of the prophets is not indifferent.

Hope and Doom and Stuff, Part II

Here’s my second post on this general subject. This was actually the post (out of the twelve we did) that received a comment, and the response I gave to the comment was what sort of completed the thought (at least a good bit more so than it had previously been articulated).

I’m putting both the prompt and then the comment it received in bold. The rest is me.

Hope does not make us ashamed, or does it?

In this week's prophets, there is a recognizable shift from pessimism to hope. Based on your readings, how does this shift take place? What theological justification exists for it in the texts themselves? By extension, when is hope justified today? By this I don't mean merely hope for an eternal reward/resolution of the problem, but hope in the present world. How do we articulate a theology of hope for today's church and world?

“God is not ‘beyond us’ or ‘in us,’ but ahead of us in the horizons of the future opened to us in his promises.” – Jurgen Moltmann

In the readings this semester, I’ve been struck several times at how God is always present to the Israelites (when he’s present) as promise for the future. From the Abrahamic covenant on, the Israelites are in relationship with God when they are offered a series of future promises: a future people, a promised land, a kingly succession, a temple, a just society, restoration from captivity, etc. Even when they are not on such good terms with God, the prophets attempt to restore Israel to relationship through future promises of destruction. The difficulty the Israelites have is in doing their part in the transformative work of actualizing these promises.

The hopefulness of the post-exilic prophets, thus, seems to stem from an intense awareness of the imminent promise of God, along with the realization that that vision has yet to be actualized. The restoration of Jerusalem, of the temple, and of the type of society promoted by God has not yet been accomplished, and as Boda points out, much of Zechariah is intended to remind the Israelites that “a new age was still not inaugurated” and that “the reason these promises remain unfulfilled is that the people are replicating the patterns of the earlier generation.” The convergence of God’s promise with the awareness of their present failure makes possible hopeful living and the hopeful impulse of these prophetic works.

In today’s church, I do think it’s difficult to articulate a theology of hope. I may be wrong, but I do get the since that we conflate the concepts of “optimism” and “hope” (I wrote about this a little last week). This allows us to be optimistic and passively think that everything’s going to turn out right for everybody. Optimistic living is simple and naïve and stems from our privileged position in the world. Naïve optimism should make us ashamed. Hopeful living, however, demands that we confront the hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness in our own lives and in the lives of those around us, and in the face of this despairing reality, and with the resulting humility, perform the revolutionary actions that transform the world toward being something more like the Kingdom envisaged by God. We must be poets and visionaries, capable of witnessing to the coming promises of God, and we must have the courage to make something of those visions immanent in our lives.

I appreciate you nuancing the difference between naive optimism and true hope. Moreover, I appreciate how call us to articulate hope in the midst of meaningless and nothinglessness. I guess my question is how do we articulate this poetic vision in the midst of 'void' (as some might say)? Certainly, we need to be able to do this, but what sustains our hope in order to do this if we are just as much a part of the problem?

Secondly, while I agree with you that the present situation of the 'post-modern' west is one that is void of meaning and value, I don't think the vast amount of people in our culture, let alone many of the people in our churches, want to acknowledge this reality. I agree somewhat with the argument that many in America tends towards consumerism instead of confronting the nihilistic void. So if we are going to visionary poets casting a vision beyond the loveless and meaningless void how we articulate such a vision when most of our audience not only doesn't want to acknowledge the reality that we see but also wants to place their hope in something else (i.e. consumerism and materialism)?

You’ve definitely caught me hiding behind a metaphor here, which I think I was doing because, at this point, I’m honestly not very sure about how to answer these questions. I’ll give it a shot, though; I’m thinking as I go.

First, I’d agree that our (post) post-modern western audience isn’t likely to jump to acknowledge the pervasive despair that I think is there. I forget exactly how Kierkegaard put it, but he writes somewhere that “the nature of despair is that it is unaware of being despair.” I’d agree. So many of us are bored, sad, confused, and alienated from ourselves and from others (not to mention from God), and the worst thing is that we don’t even realize it. The obvious thing to do in response is to diagnose the problem, so that we can begin the search for the solution. That’s what the prophets did first. This is obviously difficult, though, for at least two reasons. For one, in our free market church culture, it’s awfully easy, at the first challenging word in church, to walk out the door and down the street to Joel Osteen’s stadium, where very little that’s remotely real will ever be said. Second, our Christian language has been so overused and sentimentalized, “worn as smooth as poker chips” as Walker Percy (my favorite novelist) used to say, that there’s little real edge to it anymore. So, to (weakly attempt to) answer your second question about how address an audience that doesn’t want to hear the message, I think we have to acknowledge that we’re not likely to be very successful (I don’t think that the prophets or Jesus were overly successful at persuading people either). I’m not an optimist. But if we’re going to attempt to say it anyway, I think we have to reform our language so that it regains some texture. I think that this reformation of our language is only partly aesthetic. Mainly, this would mean acquiring the experiences and virtues that would make our speech authentic. The difficult thing, I fear, is that I think this would mean, in part, that we abandon our notions of Christendom and find our way to the margins of society, a position from which we can speak prophetically. Revolutions are carried out by people at the bottom, and to live and to speak our hope is to be a part of a revolution.

In response to your first question, what sustains our hope, particularly when we are such a part of the problem, I guess I would say humility. We’ll never not be part of the problem, at least to some degree. The humility to admit that, along with the humility to accept that grace is a possibility, seem to be the basis for hope (I guess in some ways my definition of humility would be synonymous with “faith,” so that could be another way of answering the question). I’m not exactly sure that’s the sort of answer you were looking for though.

I’m sorry I’ve written so much…

I enjoyed this article, My Daily Bread by Sara Miles, this morning over at Salon.com. It's a fairly brief excerpt from her book about her gradual conversion to Christianity that's coming out soon (which seems like it might be worthwhile).

As is usual, the comments (if you look at the non-editor's choice ones) are somwhat difficult to read, but they are pretty eye-opening, too. I'm always shocked by the distorted and caricatured view of Christianity that so many people have.

I do applaud the Salon editors for occassionally publishing articles with a positive view toward religion. Judging from the comments they receive, I don't think this ingratiates them with their typical reading audience.

Friends

I recently got on Netflix, and I really should have done so long ago. I love it (though the Abilene post office would, as usual, get poor reviews).

Anyway, if you are on there also (which I think some of you still are), I would like to be your Netflix friend. And if you would like to be my friend on there, here's the url they provided. I thought this would be easier than emailing everybody.

http://www.netflix.com/BeMyFriend/P8Sw7LkAuwwJn6u1Cerw

My Students...

Sometimes I forget that they are idiots.

Not the dumb kind.

Just the kind that doesn't know anything yet.