Community is one of the few things that both evolution and creation agree on.
We need each other – and whether you think that we were created with that desire and ability OR that we evolved it as a survival instinct… it is essential.
Book Recommendation: The 10,000 Year Explosion
Integrity, accountability and internal health are all important.
But there seems to be two different ways of approaching it – evangelicals do an outside/in direction and mainline folks take more of an inside/out approach.
Let me know your thoughts.
Joy is a bird (poem) as a framing metaphor works – especially in the 3rd week of Advent where ‘joy’ is the theme.
Read the poem here: https://powerpoetry.org/poems/joy-bird
Day 13 encourages us to “be as wise as serpents and gentle as doves”.
This involves us not have a reaction – but a reason for ‘why we do what we do’.
Here are my book recommendations:
2 quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer for your Advent week 1 reflections.
There are two things that we need to talk about as we begin our Advent journey – one involves different ways to read the Bible and the other is Emergency mentality.
Bible
There seems to be 3 popular ways to read the Bible:
Literal readings focus on what is happening in the text.
Devotional readings focus on what is happening in the reader.
Critical readings focus on what is happening along with and around the text.
Each has its own appeal – but the interesting thing is that depending on which approach someone is familiar with, they may be totally bewildered by the approach that they are least familiar with.
People who read the text literally may think, “it doesn’t matter what it means to you – it matters what really happened?”
People who read the text critically may think, “who cares if the physics make sense or the history lines up?”
People who read the text devotionally may think, “I don’t really care if there is a similar story in another religion or what was happening in another culture at the same time.”
Each approach has a strength and a blind spot.
I was raised reading the Bible devotionally for the most part and tried my best to take it literally. I was only later introduced to the critical approach in academia and now am most familiar with that perspective.
The one thing that I find most concerning about those who approach the text critically (and are bewildered by those who take it literally) is that I want to ask them, “but how does the text speak to you? What is it calling out to you? What does it want from you?”
We need to be careful in our literary analysis to not always stand above the text of scripture – to find ourselves only outside of it – and to do all of our work behind (and not within) the actual text.
So I am looking forward to spending the next month engaging the text devotionally as it has become sort of an unused muscle for my most of the time. This will be a nice change of pace.
Emergency
The other thing I want to address as we begin this series of reflection is the nature of “Emergency”. We live in an exceptional time and it manifests in a concerning number of exceptions.
In academic discourse we talked about thinkers like Bonnie Honig, in Emergency Politics, who says “The state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power.”
The problem is that we now live in a permanent state of emergency. The news can barely keep up with the daily barrage of previously unimaginable and outrageous happenings in our society and politics.
September 11, 2001 ushered in a state of perpetual exception. When people are scared they willingly sacrifice their freedom and privacy in exchange for safety. The State benefits from a frightened population and people are more willing to accept the exceptional measures.
A population is more willing to view as exceptional the excessive tactics and escalation of violence precisely because we now live in a permanent state of exception (or emergency).
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” is a sentence by Carl Schmitt that introduces ‘political theology’. That word ‘exception’ is a key to understanding what is going on in our nation right now.
In the last four centuries ‘sovereignty’ has shifted from God and the King to the Nation and State. In that same work, Schmitt also says that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”‘
In a fantastic article by Bruno Gulli examining Schmitt, Gulli explains “any person with special powers (or even simply a special sensibility) could be recognized as sovereign. This would be an honorary status conferred on him.”
It is interesting that the book begins with a storm. I am a big fan of the ‘perfect storm’ theory of crisis “where multiple negative factors converge simultaneously, creating a far more severe and destructive outcome than any single event could on its own”. I spend a lot of time tracking how smaller factors conflate or converge to form overlapping and seemingly insurmountable situations which create a sense of crisis – which subsequently leads to an emergency mentality.
One of the reasons that I was attracted to this book was the word ‘Emergency’, so it will be interesting to see where the author takes us in the entries that follow.
White normalcy works in silence by going unnamed.
When something doesn’t have a label, it can be assumed to be ‘normal’ or regular.
You can see another post about whiteness here: https://bosanders.wordpress.com/2020/06/04/whiteness-workshop/
We need to be careful about this language of a war against the virus. In the last 30 years war has migrated in meaning it has become too easily appropriated for anything we are concerned about.
We could talk about varieties that have global implications like the war on terror, to more seasonal and trivial instances like the so-called war on Christmas, and everything in between. We could talk about the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on women, and so many other instances of war migrating in dangerous ways.
There are two primary reasons for concern:
You will remember the now famous exhortation by then President George W. Bush after the events of September 11 to not let the terrorists win by … going shopping.
A brilliant article came out this week about the impending call “return to normal”. We would be wise to pay attention to how that phrase is going to be used–not everyone means the same thing when they use the same words.
American politicians have become very comfortable invoking the war analogy but it really got my attention this past weekend when the Prime Minister of Canada used to the phrase. As a dual citizen between Canada and the US it always gets my attention when something that I had thought was unique to the American military mentality shows up north of the border.
Then yesterday during the extended media circus of a Covid 19 press conference, the current President of the United States repeatedly claimed that the powers of his office were total.
This is the danger of our exceptional times–exceptions get made that are nearly impossible to retract later. They get codified and instantiated, which sets the precedent, which then moves from being a fluid situation due to an emergency to a solidified expectation that is written in stone.
The problem is that we now live in a permanent state of emergency.
I write about Emergency Politics every so often. It is far more ominous than its news coverage. Here is a snippet for those who are new:
Bonnie Honig, in Emergency Politics, says “The state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power.”
September 11, 2001 ushered in a state of perpetual exception. This applies to racial profiling, police brutality, State surveillance of its citizenry in the NSA – to name only a few.
When people are scared they willingly sacrifice their freedom and privacy in exchange for safety. The State benefits from a frightened population and people are more willing to accept the exceptional measures.
A population is more willing to view as exceptional the excessive tactics and escalation of violence precisely because we now live in a permanent state of exception (or emergency).
Gulli [in this article ] reports, “At the end of his critique of the state of exception, Giorgio Agamben addresses the question of contingency, which is very important in all of his work, when, with a reference to Benjamin, he speaks of “the urgency of the state of exception ‘in which we live’” (2005)
In his eighth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin says:
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.” (1968)
I bring this up in the hopes that our current crisis might help to create a real sense of emergency that will call into question in the larger American conscience a question about the permanent state of exception that has crept in over the past decades.
We must question the exceptional State and its emergency politics that have become too normalized and quietly accepted in our society.
5 min Good Friday reflection
See the sermon notes below on Has Von Balthasar
I grew up without much pageantry around Holy Week. We were holiness evangelicals and we kept things pretty simple and minimal.
I have grown to like some of the liturgical elements of Easter week. The palms of Sunday, the meal of Maundy, Good Friday’s Tenebrae and of course the anthems and colors of Easter Day.
I still never knew what to do with Silent Saturday. The creeds say that Jesus descended into hell. The Bible says that Jesus preached liberty to the captives – I have also heard this translated that he proclaimed victory over the evil powers. In church history it often gets called ‘the harrowing of hell’ which sounds more like something from the shire in the Lord of The Rings.
Then a couple of years ago I found this catholic theologian named Hans Von Balthasar.
[ Book: Dare We hope that all shall be saved (side note: turn toward ‘beauty – and away from self)
The vision of suffering love and its power is Christ on the cross]
He talks about suffering love and the power that is seen in the moments when Christ is on the cross. This is the beginning of a theology of Holy Saturday : The day when Christ is dead – that is to say the day when God is dead. The eternal 2nd person of the trinity is a dead man.
Von Balthasar says that we get the death of Christ wrong when see him as a conqueror descending into hell victorious. We have over-emphasized the aspect of his ‘rescuing’ the Jewish patriarchs
And we need to really embrace that his dead among the dead.
Think about that: the is a victim, scapegoated and railroaded, beaten and battered. Humiliated and made into a spectacle to intimidate future rebels. Hung up like a warning sign on the outskirts of town to alert everyone as to who was in charge. There was not just one cross that day – there were at least three. There would have been dozens that lined the road into the city. Rome crucified hundreds of conquered rebels and would be revolutionaries. He hung between to bandits that day (thieves is too mild a translation).
He was dead among the dead.
He felt abandoned by God – separated from his source of life, identity, and direction.
[von Balthasar thinks that christ descended into Sheol (not the place of punishment called Gehenna) and after his resurrection when he brought so many with him, that what was left was Gehenna. Sheol would have been the Jewish understanding that Jesus had at the time. Also translated ‘the pit’- not a place of punishment, not the afterlife, there is nothing there but being dead. ]
He went to the place of the dead. Sank to the depths of death. He enters into the pit.
More dead than anyone. More dead than any sinner. As the author of life, he was the most kind of dead.
This was thought to be good news of a sort. Every person who dies descends into this place – goes down in to the pit – and finds Christ already there.
Christ awaits you in death. More dead than you are. More forsaken than anyone ever. More abandoned than you. More separated from God that anyone has ever experienced.
It is in the separation from God that every human is embraced. Into that vacuum the dead are held in Christ.
We find a brother in death. We are not alone in the pit. We have a advocate in the midst of our suffering.
The author of life died a death and became the most dead – now doubly dead, lives to advocated for us – our great high priest – whose name is love – suffered death to the depth of despair.
I want to share this with you during this difficult time of isolation and distancing because the teaching on Holy Saturday says that you will never experience greater suffering, separation, or despair than the one who died and is ahead of us in death. You will never be more dead, more abandoned, more forsaken, more despised or rejected than one who goes ahead of you.
You are never alone and there is always one who can sympathize. Christ has gone ahead of you and lives to interceded on our behalf.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 