Scary Thoughts

Our first reading today consists of two passages that, in keeping with Halloween, might fall under the category of “scary thoughts.” At least that is how some evangelists try to use them. There is a tradition among fundamentalists Christians to attempt to convert others using small pamphlets known as “tracts.” These tracts often contain scary questions such as: “If you died tonight, do you know where your soul will go?”

To add a sense of authority to their message these tracts usually contain a couple of scripture passages. Two popular ones are ones I will read today.

Now, at the outset, lest there be any confusion, I do not intend to put down the writers or users of these tracts, and I certainly don’t intend to make fun of them. I understand them to be quite earnest, if a bit desperate in their faith. I would no more make fun of someone reaching for spiritual certainty and help than I would make fun of a dying family member whose last words seem theologically unsound. There is a time for discussing theology and a time for comfort.

But, in reading the scriptures as we do every week, as a Christian who looks at these matters in a different light, I do want to reclaim these Bible passage from the way that they are being used in these tracts. Theirs is not the final word on the subject.

The first passage is John 11:25-26

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and I am the life. If a man has faith in me, even though he die, he shall come to life; and no one who is alive and has faith shall ever die.”

The second passage comes from 1 Corinthians 15:42-44

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.

Notice the scary theme: Death. The John passage is even more scary in that it implies conditional resurrection. That is, one will be resurrected if one has faith in Jesus. Faith is a tricky thing. I can decide walk down this aisle and then immediately walk down the aisle, but I can’t decide to have faith and then just simply have faith.

This creates an unsettling feeling in many who hear these passages. I am reminded of the poster on Fox Mulder’s wall in the TV show the X-Files. The poster stated: “I want to believe.” Well, I may want to believe, but wanting isn’t enough. To satisfy the criteria of the John passage, I actually have to believe. And if I waver, then I get scared. Or I am sure that many people are scared at such loss of faith.

The remedy for many is more certainty and less doubt. The more one witnesses about one’s faith, the more he or she convinces themselves that they are indeed certain. And the more certain, the less scary are thoughts of death.

But certainty comes at a high price. If you are looking for your keys, you stop looking as soon as you find them. This method may work for keys, but does it also work for more nuanced and complex things like Biblical interpretation and an understanding of the body, soul, and death?

You stop looking for your keys, because you are sure you found them, but just because you are given a simple and comforting answer about death and your soul, does that justify that you stop looking further. Does your spiritual growth stop with the first answer?

I have heard testimony of faith that, to me, is just too flat, and superficial to believe, and yet I believe that the people who present this testimony truly believe it. It goes something like this: I was down and out (drugs, prison, divorce, teenage angst) and then a friend offered me a prayer and said that Jesus was the answer and I was saved.

Now, I should repeat, I do not wish to make fun of such stories, even though they seem all too simple and lacking in reflection. To me they read like I was hungry and sitting in the parlor. A friend came up to me, extended a cookie and said, “cookie?” and I was satisfied.

Now, there is clearly more emotional content to the acceptance of salvation than there is the acceptance of a cookie. But I am not sure there is any more cognitive component. And that, to me, is a scary thought.

We learn some math in kindergarten and 1^st grade, a first grader might even be certain that 3+3=6, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t more to learn.  Indeed, it is a little too early to be certain and to “stop looking” to get back to the key analogy.

Just as a final caution, 3+3 isn’t necessarily 6. It is in the base 10 number system that we learn first, but 3+3=1 in base 5. 3+3=2 in base 4. To clarify this analogy, let me suggest a system of modular arithmetic that you are all familiar with: the analog clock. What is 7 hours more than 8pm? It is not 15pm. It is 2am. Here is a case in which 7+8=2.

My point is that math is more complex than our initial instruction would imply. I think that faith is too. To me, the scary thought isn’t “what will happen to my soul if I die tonight?” The real scary thought is, “What will happen to my spiritual growth if I rest on a comfortable certainty and stop seeking.” To repeat: The real scary question is, “What will happen to my spiritual growth if I rest on a comfortable certainty and stop seeking.” 

Isaac's Initiation

Today is Children’s Sabbath and so we have a father-son story: that of Abraham and Isaac.

I think that most of you know the story:

• Abraham prays for a son. 
• He finally gets a son (Isaac). 
• God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. 
• Then at the last second, God spares Isaac.

It is a bit of a difficult story to hear. It is brief, yet full of possibilities. I don’t suppose to tell you definitively how you should interpret the story, but I will offer you a way out: a way to hear the story and not hate Abraham.

When we hear the story of Abraham and Isaac we often pause to ask, “What was Abraham thinking?” Was he insane? What kind of religious fanatic would even consider killing his own son, let alone making preparations to do so?

But, since our focus is on children today, I propose to ask another question: What was Isaac feeling?

Fear, I am sure as he lay bound and Abraham raised the knife for the offering, but what beyond that: disillusionment?  Contrast this feeling of disillusionment with how Isaac would have felt about his father just days before.

Consider who his father is: Abraham. We know him as the father of three faiths (Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam)—the great patriarch. He wasn’t just any man, he was someone who talked to God. He made a covenant with God, and God was already making good on his end of this covenant. Isaac himself was the fulfillment of this promise that God made to Abraham. I wonder if Isaac knew this. Imagine if he did.  He would have idolized Abraham for his relationship to God, and he would likely have felt woefully inadequate as a gift from God.

But perhaps we are looking at the story with too much hindsight. What would it have been like to have been Isaac just before that trip to Mt. Mariah?

Abraham at this time is not yet a great patriarch. He is an old man with only two young children. He has no grandchildren. He has some wealth. He has slaves, property, and live stock.

So how does a man like this—well off, but not particularly special—become a patriarch? How does he raise his sons so that they will carry on his family name? He can’t simply spoil Isaac and baby him. We see this lesson retold in second and third generation industrialists. They often become playboys—men with no particular moral or leadership distinction, and adult children who squander the wealth of earlier generations. (We see this with girls too. Paris Hilton comes to mind.)  

Isaac had to be different. Abraham has to make Isaac tough—he has to turn a boy into a man, and a father, and not just any father, but the father of all the tribes of Israel. He has to make Isaac a patriarch too. Isaac has to be his own man. He can’t just be an imitation or a follower of his father—he has to come into his own.

Isaac, like all of us, knows his own flaws. He knows his own shadow side. He knows he has fears, and doubts, and fragilities. Indeed, in what we learn of Isaac from the Bible, things are often happening to Isaac. We see it in this story, and the other big story involving Isaac is how his youngest son and wife conspire to trick him.

But, for now, in Isaac’s eyes, his father, as seen in the eyes of a young child, is a little too perfect. Most fathers are for young children. Fathers are like gods. They are all powerful. Hopefully, they are powerful for good, sometimes for ill, but powerful and they speak with authority. Their presence brings deliverance (and sometimes fear), and their absence brings longing and lack.

How could Isaac ever hope to measure up to a father like Abraham—a father who speaks to God—and a father whom God makes a covenant with?

There is notion that is ingrained in the psyche of premodern people. Abraham knew it—perhaps he wouldn’t articulate it in these modern psychological terms, but he knew it (as did others of his time and as do the gangs, drill sergeants, fraternities, and secret societies of today). Their knowledge is evidenced by their respective initiation practices; each knows the dangers of an idealized father.

What better way to transform a childish boy into a man and eventually into a father than to show that boy that he can attain what the father is—indeed even to surpass the father in some way. The first step it to bring the father down to earth—down to reality. The father cannot continue to be a god to the son. The father cannot be an idol. In a coming-of-age initiation, it may appear that the son’s life is in danger—that Isaac’s life is in danger—but the reality is that it is the idealization of the father than ends up dying.

The son gets to live as his own man, only after the idealized father is killed and the son can see the father as a man (not a god): a man of faults, doubts, fears, and excesses.

Despite what the story implies at the beginning and as it unfolds, Isaac doesn’t die. Isaac gains his life. It is often said that in substituting the Ram, God gives Isaac to Abraham a second time. That is to look at the story from above, but from Isaac’s perspective, in his initiation on Mt. Mariah, Isaac is able to see his father clearly for the first time. (Compare this story to the Star Wars saga. It is like when Luke Skywaker first sees his father without the Darth Vader mask. You will recall that just before this scene, Darth Vader tries to kill Luke—that is, he tries to kill his own son. It sounds a little like the Abraham and Isaac story.)

 For Isaac and for Skywalker, each in this pivotal moment first sees both the dark side of his father, as well as the frailty and the light side, and, in seeing this juxtaposition in one all-too-human individual, the two of them share a bond and the torch is passed to a new generation.

Now that you have heard me talk about the story, let us now hear the enduring words of the story as found in the book of Genesis.

Psalm 137

A reading of Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept

    when we remembered Zion.

There on the willow-trees

    we hung up or harps,

for there those who carried us off

    demanded music and singing,

and our captors called on us to be merry:

Understand what is going on here. This psalm is written in Babylon by Israelites who were taken there after the fall of Zion. The Israelites sitting by the rivers in Babylon are sad. They have hung their harps in trees because they have no interest in playing them. And yet their captors come to them and demand music. The Babylonians say:

‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’

But the Israelites reflect:

How could we sing the Lord’s song

    in a foreign land?

Making a promise to remember, the Israelites express their love for Zion—the land and life they were forced to leave. Further remember that this is not just land, but the place where their temple was located. It was where they talked to God—where they were protected by God—and governed by God. In remembering Jerusalem, they remember their life in closeness to God:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

    let my right hand wither away;

let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jersalem

    above my highest joy.

The next line, I think, asks for the Lord to take some revenge upon their captors. Using “remember” and “against” in an ominous manner, the Israelites pray:

Remember, O Lord, against the people of Edom

    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

when they said, ‘Down with it, down with it,

    down to its very foundations!’

O Babylon, Babylon the destroyer,

    happy the man who repays you

    for all that you did to us!

Happy is he who shall seize your children

    And dash them against a rock.

Psalm 137 starts out as a sorrowful psalm about Israelites in exile after the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. It starts in sorrow, but takes a vengeful turn at the end. As a result of this last line, the Psalm becomes controversial and problematic for use in worship. As a result, some worship leaders take the easy way out and choose not to include it as part of a worship service because it is too difficult to explain.

Others wish that it weren’t even included in the Bible, counting it as one of the least likely lines present in the Bible to have been inspired by God.

Some try to explain it by drawing attention to the mindset of the Israelites at the time: Jerusalem had just been sacked by the Babylonians. Many of their men were killed in battle. Many of their children were no doubt killed and many of their women were raped as spoils of war. The Babylonians would have killed the infants of the Israelites so that these young Israelite mothers would, in that way, be free to raise new children fathered by Babylonian soldiers. So we can see it as an “eye for an eye” expression.

We can also see it as expressing, not hatred against infants, but the length of time that the Israelites foresaw as being their time in captivity. If captivity lasted a generation, then the Babylonian babies of today would be their captors of the future. Dashing babies against a rock is a bit like the human version of the expression: nipping it in the bud: deal with something little before it becomes bigger and tougher.

As a way of taking away some of its shock, some would also point out that there was an emptiness to their “wish.” Given their subjugation, there is little chance that the Israelites actually could dash any Babylonian babies against a rock.

Others yet refer to this a “cursing” psalm and understand its use as a way of dealing with human frustration and anger. Its inclusion is an example of how the Bible can be “brutally honest” when addressing human emotion, even when what we want isn’t what we should want.

One thing is clear: The inclusion of Psalm 137 (in the Bible and as a reading in a worship service) poses a challenge to the reader and to the listener. It nearly jumps off the page demanding a response. Do we apologize for it? Do we excuse the Israelites for wishing it? Do we justify their request given their own hardship? Or do we address it in some other manner?