New Testament Reading—Matthew 6: 24-34
Imagine a ship…sailing across the seas…its captain is well loved by his rough and tumble crew. They trust him completely and follow his orders without question. In contrast, one of the crew members is made the butt of jokes on daily basis. They snidely refer to him as the dreamer because they often catch him alone on the ship’s deck gazing up into the stars of the night sky. The crew sees him as a bit of a nut case. At mealtime, he sits all by himself as the outcast of the ship.
There comes a time, however, when the ship becomes lost at sea. The crew goes for days without food and without sight of land. The ship is thrown into chaos. All of the sudden the captain is no longer popular. He's blamed for the ship's disastrous plight. The crew mutinies. The strongest and toughest of the crew take the helm first, but they too fail to steer the ship in the right direction. Finally, in the midst of their desperation, the dreamer says he knows the way. Reluctantly, the crew lets him take the helm. At the helm, the dreamer stares up into the sky, but it's not to dream, it's to gain his bearings, to tell the North from the South and the East from the West. None of the other crew members knew which direction was which. So, the dreamer steers the ship. Eventually, the lookout at the top of the mast spots land and a great cheer goes up for the dreamer, the stargazer, the crazy, yet sane, nut case who saved the ship and all its crew.
I tell this story this morning because I think it points us into the direction of the kind of images and language we need today in order to help us discern God’s presence in the world, in order to help us search for crazy, yet sane, divinely inspired nuttiness. As Christians, I think it is important for us to make sure that the voices of the outcast and the voices of those who go against the grain of society are heard and heeded. Some of you might have recognized that the story I told is a somewhat revised version of Plato’s story of the philosopher king. Plato, however, told his story for a completely different reason. He wanted to make the dreamer the king. He wanted to argue against democracy. He wanted intellectual elites—philosopher kings—to rule society. While intellectual elitism is still a problem today, we live in a society that has evolved to a point where democratic ideals and aspirations are too strong for such a blatant intellectual dictatorship. Plato’s original parable is therefore no longer very compelling, and that’s why when I tell it I like the slightly revised version.
To get a grasp on the mysteries of God, we need poetry, metaphors, and parables. Some of these can be seemingly timeless: the poetry of the Beatitudes, the metaphors of bread and wine, and the parable of the Good Samaritan. Yet, the way we think as humans also evolves with time. Our consciousness about certain issues and forms of oppression rises. We acquire new understandings of the world. And, when our consciousness and understandings change sometimes our language and the images we use are forced to change as well. Gender inclusive language is one way in which the thinking of many Christians has evolved alongside a growing awareness of sexism. It is my hope that consciousness of social class will be one of the next frontiers of growing awareness that effects how we think and talk about God.
Some of you have asked me what my dissertation is about and part of it relates to our scripture for today in a couple of ways. First, if you’ll let me indulge, one of the things my dissertation does is highlight and question the ways in which both preachers and scripture conceive of God in terms of class. What does it mean to think of God as a slave master, a landlord, or the owner and ruler of the universe? What does it mean to think of our selves as obedient slaves to God’s will or as managers—stewards—of God’s creation? Our scripture for today makes a reference to God as a slave master. It says one cannot serve two masters. One cannot serve both God and wealth. At the time it was written, this passage would have evoked an actual law about masters and slaves. While slavery is offensive to us today, this particular image of God as a slave master probably does not currently rankle too many, especially sense it’s underlying meaning arguably challenges one of the driving forces behind class oppression: the pursuit of wealth as one’s guiding motive in life.
Still, as the scripture reading continues, an understanding of God as an authoritarian ruler or master persists in ways that we might question. This brings me to another part of my dissertation. One of things I looked at in my dissertation was how some preachers, some of the most popular preachers in Oakland, California, in fact, preach what is often called the prosperity gospel. In essence, the theology of the prosperity gospel movement says that God financially and materially rewards and punishes people according to their faithfulness and obedience. Often this faithfulness and obedience is presumed to be expressed through such things as tithing. Thus, a prosperity gospel preacher might say, “The more you give to God through your tithes and offerings, the more you get in return.” In churches with poor working class members, one might imagine people giving their last dollar to the church hoping to be financially blessed by God in return.
Our scripture reading for today can be interpreted in ways that dovetail with some of the core ideas of the prosperity gospel message. Our scripture implies the notion of God as someone who meets all our needs so long as we are obedient and faithful. It says that if we “strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness,” then all of the food, drink, and clothing we need will be given to us. One might ask whether we really want to imagine God as a kind of ruler or slave master who rewards and punishes us with the necessities of life. Does such a conception even make sense given our modern understandings of the world? Are we to believe that there are 800 million people today in the world who suffer from chronic hunger because they have not been obedient slaves to God?
There are probably biblical scholars who would say that the interpretation I am giving to our scripture reading is a bit unfair. Perhaps, the original audience for the text was not a destitute audience who felt punished with poverty for their lack of faith. Maybe it was an audience that had more than enough food, clothing, and shelter. Maybe they had a very real problem with decadence, materialism, and worrying about whether they had things they really didn’t need. Maybe they needed to be told to stop worrying about accumulating lots of stuff. Perhaps, the audience even contained poor peasants who placed undue stress and worry upon themselves by desiring things beyond their means that they didn’t really need. If that was the case, I don’t have a problem with our scripture questioning whether or not such worrying does one any good, so long as we realize it would be offensive to tell a starving family not to worry about whether they will have food for dinner.
With that said, is it still possible that one can convey the same message without using class metaphors of God as a master or ruler? Discerning the presence of God in the world and finding the right language to express it is a difficult task. Instead of imagining God’s presence in terms of be
ing like that of a slave master or even a ship’s captain, I prefer to think of God’s presence in terms of divine nuttiness. I like to think that sometimes it is the nut cases who go against the grain who lead us to God. Admittedly, this image is not without its own problems. While I was on vacation, I made the mistake of watching the movie “Into the Wild.” Perhaps, some of you have read the book or seen the movie. It’s a good movie, but it’s also a good source of cinematically-induced depression. I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone, so I will just say that the movie tells the true story of a young man who rebelled against his parents and society by leaving everyone behind to go live by himself in the wilderness of Alaska. He had no electricity and no contact with other humans. He picked wild plants and hunted everything from squirrels to moose in order to survive. Along the way, the young man actually arrives at some great insights about how to make life meaningful, but the story also demonstrates that his sometimes wonderful nuttiness had some real problems and that his wilderness lifestyle is not exactly recommendable as a survival strategy.
Some of you may or may not be aware that there is a small movement in the United States called anarcho-primitivism. As I understand it, this movement in part responds to the destructiveness of contemporary agricultural practices and industrial civilization by seeking a return to a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life. With good reason, this might sound rather nutty to most of us. The famous linguist and political scientist Noam Chomsky has described the call for returning to a hunter-gatherer life as a call for “the worst mass genocide in human history.” Even though he himself is a sharp critic of how our current society is structured and supports alternatives to it, he knows that if we were to just eliminate the current structures, people would die in large numbers. Most people simply are not capable of growing their own food.
With that said, there are some people out there who are addressing the environmental crisis in serious and credible ways that may at first sound rather nutty. At the moment, I am in the middle of reading George Monboit’s book entitled Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Monboit is a British columnist who is one of the most widely read writers in the world outside of the United States. In 1995, Nelson Mandela presented him with a UN award for outstanding environmental achievement. Sounds like a credible guy. In his book, he argues that rich nations such as ours need to cut their carbon emissions by 90% before 2030 in order to prevent a global environmental catastrophe. He then puts forth a plan for how this can be done without significant changes in our current living standards. I think the book is well worth reading. There just might be some inspired, divine nuttiness in it.
When I was a student, I went to my share of both academic and social activist conferences. Of all the conferences I attended, none challenged me more than one I went to in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. It wasn’t the conference speakers who were particularly challenging. It was the participants who sat next to me in the audience. Many of them were people who had done everything they could to live ecologically sustainable lives. There were people from Catholic worker houses, urban communes, and rural self-sustaining farms. Some of them had tried to the greatest extent possible to remove themselves from the grid of industrialized society. Some of them might have even been anarcho-primitivists. At one point in the conference, I drove around Champaign-Urbana with a group of conference participants in an old school bus that ran on used cooking oil that they got from restaurants. Near the front of the bus was a huge plastic drum that stored the oil. It was a fun trip, but what I remember most from the conference was how it forced me to look at myself in the mirror: was I living a life that was complicit with destroying the environment? Was I living a life where I continually left my relationship to the oppressive and destructive systems around me unquestioned? All of this was unsettling for me, but in the end, I felt glad. I felt glad that I had found some fellow dreamers and stargazers. I felt glad that I was being pushed to search for crazy, yet sane, divinely inspired nuttiness. Amen.