Scott AndersonAmos 5:6-7, 10-15 † Psalm 90:12-17 † Hebrews 4:12-16 † Mark 10:17-31 There are five big words in the scriptures that speak to what God is like. Five big words that make the journey through the arc of the scriptures. Five big words that speak of God, and speak of us, because in the Christian biblical tradition, what it means to be human is to be in the image of God. What it means to be human is to delight in what God delights.[I] Five big words that speak of promise and possibility. Five big words that speak to what holds the world together. Five big words that give us something of an anchor in these unmoored times. Five big words: Justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, compassion. I’ve been thinking about these lately, because I’ve been wondering about how we are going to hold together what seems to be spinning apart. I’ve been wondering about how we are going to find ways to live as one, to live with hope, to look to a future that is for everyone, not just for the 50.1 percent of us—or sometimes less—who can muster the votes to muscle our way or our version of the world on others. I’ve been thinking about these lately because, not only can we not agree on ideals, goals, truth. We seem not even to be able to agree on facts. Five big words: Justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, compassion.
But what if I told you that truth has always been contested? What if it turns out there has always been fake news or at least competing versions of it? And that those with the power have often had an oversized effect on which stories are told and which aren’t. And what if it turns out that these scriptures, and this tradition, were built for just such a time as this? “Indeed,” says the writer of Hebrews, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, … it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 13 And before him … all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.[ii] Fake news, lies and untruths, hidden motivations and manipulation. It turns out that these too are as old as the hills. Take the slow acceptance of science. How easily we forget that Galileo was condemned by the church in 1633 in the Roman Inquisition for his affirmation of heliocentrism—the astronomical theory that the earth and planets revolve around the sun at the center of the solar system. The church and its authorities said this was heretical—the bible so clearly illustrated that the earth was the center of the universe. Some elements of the Catholic church fought for centuries beyond when the science was well established. Galileo was right, of course. And the church eventually caught up, but not before it resisted and used its considerable power to punish Galileo, subjecting him to a lifetime of house arrest, requiring him to officially recant, and banning his scientific works.[iii] There are fake gods masquerading in the Christian tradition, says Walter Brueggemann, one of my former teachers. But he isn’t talking so much about facts and data. What is fake may not be what you or I might first identify as most troublesome and heartbreaking in this time in which so much is disputed. But I think he’s onto something about the ways in which these five big words—justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, compassion—have everything to do with the moment and our way through it. “This fake God yields a gospel that is fake news,” Brueggemann says. The fake god is one of fear, greed, tribal exclusiveness, and ready violence. This is a god who is worshipped and obeyed by fake Christians who believe the fake news, and who advocate for fear, greed, tribal exclusiveness, and violence in their own lives. And when we are honest, we find that we ourselves, all of us, are susceptible and sometimes tempted to that fake news and that fake life.[iv] What is fake, Brueggemann is suggesting, is any sense that we do not belong together. Fear, greed, tribal exclusiveness and violence all betray this underlying belief. But these five big words dispute this idea with all their might: Justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, compassion. We find two of them in the lament of the prophet Amos: Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground![v] The others are there in the prophets and all the scriptures that were Jesus’ bible. They propel Jesus in his response to both the rich man and to the disciples who are so stung by the interaction. It’s there in the gaze. It is there in the looking. In the story Jesus looks. He looks at the rich man and loves him with a steadfast love. He looks around and speaks to his disciples of righteousness, “How hard it will be for those with wealth,” with other commitments and distractions that suggest we are not connected. He looks again at them when they are so flummoxed by what he’s said of justice—so who can be saved? Peter says, “Look, Jesus. We’ve left everything to follow you.” In truth, they haven’t—yet. That’s fake news. But Jesus, with compassion, sees that too. He looks closely and sees that all these possessions or the lack of them may not be the biggest challenge for the disciples. It may be the need to be right that is the greatest idol of all. It may be hardest of all to give up our sense of being on the right side of things, holding the right answers, being in the right tribe—fear, greed, tribal exclusiveness, and ready violence, as Brueggemann names it. But Jesus sees. He sees where they are and he sees that they will get there—by way of justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, and compassion. Don’t get me wrong. Facts are facts. We should not confuse this. Truth, on the other hand is subject to greater dispute. And the need to be right makes us susceptible to fake news and a fake life. It is one of our greatest barriers to that which the scriptures profess as the way to be human—that tenacious engagement with the reality of the world, that vigorous commitment to the suffering that speaks around us, that refusal to casually overlook in ourselves what we condemn in another, the steadfast commitment to love our neighbor as our brother or sister, the compassion that helps us to see the suffering and the longing of another. And the way to this, according to the arc of these scriptures, is through justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, and compassion. We have a lot of work to do. The world seems especially smitten these days with wealth and might and right. But a church that understands that the way forward is the way that arcs through our faith has much to offer. Humanness of a relational kind, tenacious commitment, deep listening that refuses to let us continue to argue past one another—justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness, and compassion—in such a world as this. Amen. Notes: [i] Some of these ideas are drawn from Walter Brueggemann’s “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” in Journal for Preachers, Advent, 2018, p. 26. [ii] Hebrews 4:12-13. [iii] See “Galileo affair” on Wikipedia.org. Retrieved on October 13, 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair. [iv] Walter Brueggemann. “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” in Journal for Preachers, Advent, 2018, p. 26 [v] Amos 5:7.
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