Author: Mike Rivage-Seul's Blog

Emeritus professor of Peace & Social Justice Studies. Liberation theologian. Activist. Former R.C. priest. Married for 48 years. Three grown children. Eight grandchildren.

Stop Being a Control Freak: (Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time)

(Sunday’s Readings: Ez. 17: 22-24; Ps. 92:2-3, 13-14, 15-16; II Cor.5:6-10; Mk. 4:26-34)

It’s June now and most of us are trying to get rid of dandelions. They’re all over the place. Most of us hate them. I’ve long since given up on trying to kill them. I figure the way nature works, they’ll be gone in a month or so anyway.

What bothers me are “trees of heaven.” The hill behind my house on Jackson Street is now filled with them. Some people call them “stink trees.” I cut them down one spring, and the very next, they’re back, more than ever. They just won’t go away. They want to take over and create their own forest. As I’m cutting them down, I imagine them laughing at me. “Your chain saw can roar and smoke as much as it wants,” they seem to be saying, “It makes no difference. We’ll prevail in the end.”

Today’s Gospel reading caused me to think of dandelions and trees of heaven – and some other things as well. It really makes three points. The first is about God’s providence, the second is about those “trees of heaven,” and the third is about Jesus’ teaching method. He taught in parables which help us understand God’s providence, the processes of life, and the inevitably of the Kingdom of God and its mystery.

The first point about God’s providence brought to mind Sir Arthur Eddington. He was a physicist who did his work before the middle of the 20th century.  At the end of his life, he remarked that after all his time and effort, he knew only one thing. “Something unknown,” he said ”is doing we don’t know what.”

In parable form, Jesus says something like that in today’s Gospel. Farmers sow seeds, he says, and then some mysterious force takes over and brings them to fruition. The farmer sows the seed; nothing else is required of him, but to reap the harvest.

“Don’t worry,” is the implication. There’s no need for you to push the river; no need to control. God is in charge. After you’ve done your best, Eddington’s “Something Unknown” takes over. And the outcome is the very best possible. Inevitably, that outcome will be the Kingdom of God whether we want it to come or not.

Central to Jesus’ parable is the notion of faith as “letting go” so that God’s work might be done in God’s own time. That’s so hard for us to accept, isn’t it? Just looking around the world, watching the news, thinking about our own lives, our marriages, our children, most of us find that counsel incredible. We’re convinced we have to get to work, not waste a moment, and clean up the mess.

Yet today, Jesus implies that acting like a control freak is exactly the wrong strategy in life. It leads to unhappiness, nervous breakdowns, discouragement, and to a negativity that brings others down. Jesus was not about any of that. He was about kindling hope not giving in to stress and worry.

Jesus was able to avoid that kind of negativity because he had a guiding vision. Once again, he called it the “Kingdom of God.” That vision held, as today’s Parable of the Farmer and the Seed suggests that God is in charge and so it’s foolish for us to worry and fret.

But what is God up to? Jesus surprises us with his answer. (And that brings me to the second point of today’s Gospel – stink trees.) Jesus says God’s Kingdom is like a mustard tree. That’s like saying it’s like a tree of heaven or a dandelion.  

I say that because, I’m told the mustard tree really isn’t a tree at all. Scripture scholar, John Dominic Crossan says it’s a plant that’s more like a weed. We don’t like weeds, do we – those dandelions again? We don’t recognize them as beautiful or powerful. But they could be seen that way – and probably should be. Deep down we know they have a part in the earth’s ecology. Birds come to the mustard tree (or the tree of heaven), and make their home there, Jesus reminds us.

As for power, have you ever seen a weed move a rock? I have. I think that’s what Jesus meant (with his typical hyperbole) when he said, “If you have faith like a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain move from here to there and it will move.” Compared to the mustard seed, a rock of almost any size is like a mountain. Weeds are beautiful; they are part of God’s plan; weeds are powerful. Learn from them Jesus seems to be saying – inevitably, I think, with a mischievous smile.

But learn what? That what we see as small and weak, what we see as negative is all part of the plan. See beauty in what the world sees as ugly. Small is beautiful. But whether you do or not is irrelevant in terms of God’s will. It will be done in any case. You can dig up the dandelions, spray them with Roundup, or cut down those pesky trees of heaven. You can’t stop that Something Unknown from doing we don’t know what.

And that brings me to the third point of this morning’s Gospel – the power of parable. They can turn our worlds upside down. They surprise, delight, confuse, disturb, challenge, or comfort. They’re meant to make us think more deeply and to stimulate discussion. That’s the case with today’s Parable of the Farmer and the Seed, as well as with the Mustard Plant.

Above all, the power of parable is illustrated in the case of Jesus himself. Jesus, after all, is the best parable our tradition holds.  He was a seed sown 2000 years ago that continues to bear fruit today. But he and his message were also like a weed. He wasn’t a Cedar of Lebanon, but more like that mustard plant. Like the rest of us, Jesus lived such an extremely limited life, but he accomplished everything.  

Think about it. We believe Jesus is the very presence of God. Yet in the world’s eyes, he did absolutely nothing with more than 90 % or his life. We know nothing of what he did with his life till he was about 30. And then, history records, he did a few relatively insignificant things in an insignificant part of the world.

Not only that, what he did eventually do all ended in failure. He evidently thought the Kingdom was coming in his own lifetime. But here we are 2000 years later, and not a sign of its arrival as far as we can see.

…  As far as we can see. Our trouble is with our limited vision. We’re expecting God’s Kingdom to be the “Cedar of Lebanon” referenced by Ezekiel in the first reading. It won’t be like that, Jesus says. With a smile, he suggests, it will be something small – even something we see as undesirable, ugly or failed – even like our own lives.

Our perception forgets about the Kingdom vision that was so central to Jesus’ life. In modern terms, we might say, we only see a small part of life’s computer screen – that lower right hand corner for example. We see maybe an inch or so of a screen that’s 21 inches big. On the huge part we’re not seeing, God is up to all kinds of things we’re not aware of – that we can’t be aware of or even understand.

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. All we have to do is our best at whatever task life has given us, and then get out of the way. That’s what Jesus seems to be telling us this morning.

What do you think? Can we accept that Good News? Can we recognize God at work in the mustard plant, in the dandelion, in the tree of heaven?

Why I Left the Priesthood: Part One

At least before all the scandals hit, I had always admitted quite freely and with a certain sense of pride that I had been a priest “in a former life.” I suppose that’s because as a Catholic born before the Second Vatican Council, some positive residuals still lurked in my mind around the ideas of priesthood and church. It’s also because I still sincerely value the training, education, spiritual focus, lasting friendships, and tradition of hospitality that I inherited from my 20 years of formal association with the Society of St. Columban (the organization of priests to which I belonged). Besides, people in the contexts where I’ve worked since then –   mostly at Berea College in Central Kentucky, or in our local St. Clare’s church (where I had also served as a priest in that “former life”) – seemed to appreciate my previous incarnation. So when they’d ask me why I left the priesthood, I used to say,

I don’t think I’ve ever left the priesthood, or even could. They always told us “once a priest, always a priest;” and I think that’s true. The priesthood isn’t something “they” confer on a person. It’s an acknowledgement of an identity, a “character” that no one and no decision by me or by “them” can remove. I, and so many of my colleagues in the seminary, had a priestly character from the beginning, and ordination simply amounted to its acknowledgement and confirmation by the church. So I still think of myself as a priest. It’s true, the sacramental dimension is missing. But apart from that, as a teacher of theology and director of a Peace and Social Justice Studies program, I’m pretty much doing the same work I did before I left the canonical priesthood. I’m still a priest.

 That’s what I used to say. I don’t any longer like that answer. Its approach to the priesthood was too exceptional, setting me and my friends apart from others in a way I’ve come to see as self-serving. None of us was at all that unique. We were pretty much ordinary, working class kids, who escaped factory work (or truck driving, or delivery routes, or the policeman’s beat) to become the first in our families to get a college education. We joined a highly exclusive club that put us on a pedestal from the beginning, and gave us an exaggerated opinion of our own importance. Before we were 30 or had done really anything at all, we were among the most honoured and important people in our communities. That sort of unmerited aura and especially the accompanying expectations eventually drove me from the priesthood as I once knew it. 

Still there was truth in my statement about priestly character. There was indeed something special about me and those who came with me through the seminary. But the specialness belonged not to me or to them uniquely. What my words unwittingly expressed was an intuition about the nature of being human. The intuition is that everyone has that priestly character I was referring to. Luther, I think, (with his dependence on Augustine) was gesturing towards something like that. Though he didn’t say it as clearly as mystics like Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross – or as Hindus or Buddhists do – he was referring to the spark of the divine (the indwelling Spirit) deep within everyone. Awareness of its presence simply dawns on certain people earlier than on others. For some, it never reaches consciousness at all. It happened to dawn on me (more or less) quite early, but not in the way it has over the past decade or so. To get there I had to do a lot of growing, sometimes painful, but often delightful.  The growth was intellectual, personal, and spiritual. Each step moved me further and further from the priesthood as I imagined it for myself and experienced it in others before ordination.

(Next Monday: Intellectual Steps away from the Priesthood)

The First Religious War of the 21st Century (Sixth in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

That liberation theology dared from 1968 on to enter the arena of religion which the right had long dominated virtually without rival astounded and infuriated the keepers of empire. Peasants throughout the subjugated world found entirely empowering the new explanations of God, Jesus and the gospels which this Friday series of blog posts has reviewed. Everywhere throughout Latin America they formed biblical circles, and those circles issued in social movements for justice.

In response, the Rockefeller Report of 1969 already identified liberation theology as a threat to the national security of the United States. By 1987, the Latin American Military Chiefs of Staff meeting in conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, devoted several pages of their final report to liberation theology and the threat it posed to regional stability.  In between, in 1979 the first Santa Fe Document advised the incoming Reagan administration that it had to do something decisive about the threat posed by liberation theology. The administration heeded the advice, and responded both militarily and ideologically.

Reagan’s military strategy against liberation theology issued in what Noam Chomsky describes as the first religious war of the 21st century. It was the war of the United States against the Catholic Church in Latin America whose bishops, as noted earlier, had together dared to affirm a “preferential option for the poor” as their official position. To combat that commitment, the U.S. did exactly what Rome had done in the first three centuries of our era – and for the same reason: faithfully following Jesus who called empire into question and motivated the poor to assert their rights in this world as children of the God of life.

And both the Roman response and the U.S. response to Jesus and his followers resulted in blood baths. Many of us are well acquainted with the best-known martyrs: Camilo Torres, Archbishop Romero, the Salvadoran team of liberation theologians killed at San Salvador’s Central American University in 1989, the U.S. women religious murdered years earlier in that same country, and Che Guevara. (Yes, Che. His spirituality was secular, but it was no less spiritual or liberationist than any of the others.) And then the unending list of martyrs in this war against the Catholic Church – 200,000 in Guatemala, more than 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and literally untold killings and disappearances in Honduras. In every case, the carnage was a response to social movements inspired by liberation theology. Again, as Chomsky points out, official U.S. military documents show that liberation theology was a major target of those wars. In fact within those same official documents, the Army boasts specifically about defeating LT.

As for Reagan’s ideological response to liberation theology . . . .  On his accession to power, CIA psyops began funding conservative alternatives to liberation theology in Latin America and in the U.S. So did business concerns that saw the leftward drift of Latin America as a threat to their presence there. Domino’s Pizza and Coors Brewery were prominent among the cases in point. As a result, evangelicals throughout the region grew rapidly in number, and the recipients of those funds in the United States increasingly identified with Republicans, the “hand that fed them.” So the television programs of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, and others were beamed into every poor barrio, población, and favela. Right wing churches sprang up everywhere feeding and expanding an already robust evangelical presence in areas once completely dominated by the Catholic Church. The message was always the same – a depoliticized version of Christianity whose central commitment involved accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior and rejecting communism including the type allegedly represented by the theology of liberation.

All of this points up the extreme importance of LT. In effect liberation theology was not only responsible for spiritual and political awakening throughout Latin America, it was also indirectly responsible for the rise of the religious right in the United States, and ultimately for the Tea Party.  

In fact, the rise of evangelicalism as the dominant contingent in the Republican Party was the result of an offensive against a powerful U.S. form of liberation theology. According to Chip Bertlet, who has been researching right wing populism for the last 25 years and more, the energizing force behind the offensive was the political right’s project to capture and channel the angry reaction of large numbers of white Southern Christians against the Civil Rights Movement animated by a nascent form of black liberation theology closely identified with Martin Luther King. In that context, the Reagan administration’s offensive against LT (and the Civil Rights Movement) took on a particular U.S. embodiment paralleling the Latin American form just referenced. The U.S. form also involved assassinations, F.B.I. surveillance, and identification of civil rights leaders as “communists.” Since the zeitgeist following the legislative and social successes of the Civil Rights Movement made overtly anti-black campaigns impossible, the U.S. form could not simply call for a repeal civil rights legislation. It took on instead a campaign against “Big Government” seen as responsible for implementing those legislative reforms.

Just like the Latin American campaign against LT, the U.S. counterpart took off in 1979, and achieved real prominence over a brief period of 18 months. Since “Roe v. Wade” represented an instance of “Big Government’s” power, abortion was adopted as a trigger issue masking the racism just below the surface. The issue was adopted as pivotal even though prior to 1968 no protestant denomination had an official position on abortion. (See “Right Wing Populism in the U.S.A.: Understanding Social Movements of the Right in America Today,” Talk delivered at the Z Media Institute, Woods Hole, MA, June 8th, 2010. See also the PBS film “With God on our Side.”)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, we currently have in the White House the first U.S. president directly influenced by liberation theology. For 20 years, Barack Obama was part of the congregation of Jeremiah Wright – identified by James Cone, the father of black liberation theology, as the black liberation theology’s foremost contemporary embodiment. LT’s importance was illustrated in the 2008 debate about Jeremiah Wright’s influence on Candidate Obama which nearly derailed his run for the presidency. 

In other words, liberation theology has been far more influential than most are willing to recognize. In a sense, it has shaped U.S.-Latin American relations for a half-century. It has changed the face of Protestantism in the United States.

In addition, Ronald Reagan’s ideological strategy against liberation theology changed the Catholic Church. Reagan’s offensive involved allying himself with a conservative anti-communist Polish pope, John Paul II, who proved to be an inveterate enemy of liberation theology. The apparent agreement between the two was that John Paul would be silent about the war against Latin American Catholics, if Reagan would help him in the pope’s campaign against communism in Poland. During his reign of over 20 years, John Paul was to gradually replace Latin America’s pro-liberation theology bishops with conservative pre-Vatican II types. He did this throughout the world – mostly in direct response to liberation theology.

Even more virulently set against liberation theology was John Paul’s lieutenant, Joseph Ratzinger, whom the pope appointed head of the Sacred Congregation for the Faith (formerly the Office of the Holy Inquisition). In that capacity, Ratzinger penned an official warning about liberation theology in 1985. Basically, it rejected the movement because of its association with Marxist analysis of third world poverty. Of course, Ratzinger succeeded John Paul II in the papacy. He’s now Pope Benedict XVI. So the onslaught against liberation theology continues with no end in sight.

Sadly, Reagan’s two-front strategy worked. Revolutionary gains in El Salvador, Guatemala, and most prominently, in Nicaragua were halted and reversed. Militarily, the “Guatemala Solution” was the template. It entailed using military and paramilitary death squads to kill everyone remotely connected with guerrilla movements. According to the Reagan strategy, that included priests, nuns, lay catechists and ministers of the word influenced by liberation theology. The theological strategy worked as well. The slogan promulgated by the Salvadoran military said it all, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.” 

But despite the carnage, and despite the claims of victory by the U.S. military, liberation theology remains alive and well in grass-roots movements for solidarity. And in general, social movements inspired by liberation theology bore fruit in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They continue to bear fruit today. More specifically, it is possible to say credibly that apart from the theology of liberation, it is impossible to explicate Allende’s rise to power in 1973 or the triumph of the Sandinistas in 1979, or the power the FMLN in El Salvador had and continues to enjoy today. The Zapatista movement in Mexico is also intimately connected with liberation theology. Even more, without reference to liberation theology, it’s impossible to fully understand the rise of new left governments throughout Latin America. All of them are indebted to liberation theology and its power to motivate the grassroots. (Evo Morales’ rise to power in Bolivia might be an exception. But even he used Andean myths of liberation to mobilize indigenous grassroots forces on his behalf).

That same power to motivate is evident in the ongoing “Arab spring.” There the power derives from the liberation currents undeniably present in Islam. In fact, as Gandhi saw in changing the face of India, similar currents are found in Hinduism. Again, it is possible to credibly assert that liberation theology has at its roots elements found at the center of all the religions of the world. In this light, the world-wide offensive against Islam represents the latest phase of the now Thirty Years War against liberation theology under wherever form it may appear.

Next Friday: Series Conclusion

The Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ: the Last Supper wasn’t a magic show

Readings: Exodus 24:3-8; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Today is the feast of The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. It used to be called “Corpus Christi.” And the Gospel reading (Mark’s account of the Last Supper) brings us into familiar territory. I mean we observed Holy Thursday just two and a half months ago. And here we are centralizing yet another account of Jesus’ final meal.

Of course, the emphasis on Holy Thursday and today is supposed to be different. On Holy Thursday the Last Supper was part of the account of Jesus’ final days. On Corpus Christi the focus is on the sacrament of the Eucharist itself, what we used to call “Holy Communion.” Today the spotlight is on the “Real Presence” of Jesus, body, blood, soul, and divinity in the “elements” which retain the appearances of bread and wine.

In the past, this was the time for sermons on “transubstantiation,” and the priestly powers conferred in ordination. Corpus Christi was an occasion for processions of the Blessed Sacrament even through town squares, for its “exposition” in “monstrances,” for solemn “benedictions” and “holy hours” of adoration.  

Historically, this feast has been a specifically Catholic affair implicitly contrasting Catholic belief with Protestants who since the Reformation denied the Catholic understanding of the Real Presence.

I won’t bore you by rehearsing the differences between Catholic “transubstantiation” and Protestant “trans-signification” and “trans-finalization.” Somehow it all seems rather quaint and beside the point, doesn’t it? I mean, who cares – except perhaps for a few brief moments on Sunday mornings between nine and ten o’clock? We have so many personal problems with our children, in our jobs, in our marriages. . . . Besides, the world is in such a dark state, who has time for such theological niceties?

And don’t even talk to me about the church; it is so problematic for most of us. How could we spend time and energy on inter-denominational disputes when we find the Mass itself increasingly meaningless? Each Sunday many of us end up struggling with the question, “Why am I still coming here?” Get real!

Well, getting real and retaining hope in the face of darkness on all fronts is actually what today’s account of the Last Supper is really about. It’s not about transubstantiation of bread and wine at all. It is we who need to be “transubstantiated” as people and specifically as Catholics. The Gospel calls us to fundamental change in our faith about Eucharist.

Consider what happened at the Last Supper and then what became of it over the years. Consider what we could make of it today.

For Jesus, this final Passover meal is wrought with anxiety to say the least. Jesus and his friends have now gone underground. After a demonstration in the Temple which turned violent, they are now being hunted. There is a price of 30 shekels of silver on Jesus’ head, and he suspects one of his inner circle is about to turn him in for the reward. The “safe house” Jesus has secured for the Passover meal has been located by a secret sign and a password.

In such dark circumstances, Jesus looks at the bread he breaks, and the action reminds him that his very body is under threat. The cup of wine he passes around becomes for him his own blood that soon could be whipped, nailed, drained and speared from his veins.

But he doesn’t lose hope. In effect amidst betrayal by a close friend, a price on his head, premonitions of his own death, and threatened failure of his entire enterprise, Jesus proposes a toast to God’s Kingdom. Despite everything he remains convinced God’s reign will soon dawn. In fact, takes a vow not to drink wine again until that happens. His fast from wine is another form of his familiar prayer, “Thy kingdom come.”  In the end, Jesus asks his disciples (come what may) to share bread and wine as he has done – with one another and across ethnic and other divisions (with Jew and gentile, woman and man, rich and poor, “clean” and “unclean”), and to do this specifically in his memory.

And that’s what the early Christians did. They broke bread in memory of Jesus, his values and the way he lived. In the early church, they called this a “love feast.” And people would come together with pot luck dishes and share with everyone. Until the 5th century women would often preside at the feast – as they usually do at meals in every home on the planet. Sometimes men would preside too. (It wasn’t until the 14th century that the Eucharistic “celebrant” had to be an ordained “priest.”)

And all would be invited, rich and poor. (In fact, one of the great attractions of early Christianity was the generosity with which Christians shared their bread with the needy.) Twice in the Book of Acts Luke describes the first Christians as leading what could only be called a “communistic” ways of life.  Acts 2:44 reads:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

That’s what the early Christians made of Jesus’ injunction to “Do this in memory of me.” They truly understood what later would be termed “The Real Presence:” bread is bread; wine is wine; when they are shared Jesus truly becomes present in his Holy Spirit. Early Christians understood that Jesus’ “Real Presence” could not be separated from the way he lived – at the service of the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, the hungry and thirsty.

The rub however is that the Eucharist gradually turned into something else. That business about actually doing what Jesus commanded – you know “Sell what you have; give it to the poor; and come follow me” . . .  That was too much for church leaders after they sold out to Constantine’s Empire in the 4th century. They started living like kings and needed something more comfortable. 

So they transformed the Christian “love feast” into a “Mass.” And as the middle ages progressed, the Mass turned into a magic show. Before our very eyes, bread was transformed into the body of Jesus, and wine became his blood. The priest alone had the requisite magical powers. Belief in that magic act became what the Eucharist was about.

In all of this, focus shifted from transformation of those participating in the Eucharist to transformation of the bread, which eventually became a plastic-like wafer that looks nothing like the bread whose sharing so concerned Jesus.

We could change all of that beginning right now. The Lord’s Supper doesn’t have to be the dreary “hocus pocus” it became before Vatican II and threatens to become again today under extremely conservative church leadership. Like Jesus’ last meal, the Eucharist can reassume its character as an occasion for recommitment to God’s Kingdom, even as we experience a dark night of our Catholic souls and just as human beings. If Jesus wasn’t overwhelmed by his circumstances, how can we be crushed by ours?

In fact, if we open our eyes in hope, we can see many reasons to toast God’s Kingdom despite our many problems as believers. For instance, did you know that a group of Catholics and Protestants of various denominations are forming an alternative Eucharistic congregation right here in our own community? Its intention is not to replace our attendance at Mass, but to supplement it with a celebration that can provide experience of what inspired, life-connected worship can be.

Also, this fall Fr. Matthew Fox, the fiery spiritual teacher, liturgist and theologian will be speaking at Berea College.  He has already expressed a willingness to meet with our parishioners to discuss church renewal with us. Similarly, Sr. Joan Chittister, the Benedictine nun and spiritual leader, will be a Berea College convocation speaker this fall.

Additionally, next November 9th to 11th, the National Catholic “Call to Action” campaign will be holding its annual meeting in Louisville – at the Galt House. We could send a delegation of 20 people or more (including our pastor) to get inspired by world-class speakers and by what other churches are doing to revive the spirit of Vatican II.  Please mark your calendars for that event.  

Besides all of that, this October 11th is the 50th anniversary of the convening of the Second Vatican Council. There will be observances of the occasion all over the world. We could mark the anniversary right here in our own parish with a “tent revival” with invited speakers, and with teach-ins on Vatican II. We could even pool our money to provide tuition for our pastor to update his theology in some progressive theological, liturgical or pastoral program.

All of these events have the potential to “transubstantiate” us as a community – to change us to the core as a community of faith.

So things might not be as dark as we might think. There may indeed be light at the end of this tunnel we’ve been struggling through for too long.

Jesus’ own faith in and hope for God’s Kingdom is our inspiration. If he could have faith and hope in his dreary circumstances, how can we not be hopeful? If he is for us, if we sup with him, who can stand against us? Let’s get on with it!

The Impact of Wikileaks on Imperial Conspiracies (Third & Final Installment on the Demise of U.S. Empire)

Having examined the demise of the Catholic Church and of economies based on Jurassic Age fuel deposits, we turn now to the role of information communication technologies (ICT) in exposing government conspiracies and by doing so helping to bring down U.S. Empire. The topic here is Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Assange and his Wikileaks colleagues are conspiracy theorists and proud of it.  For them (as for lawyers everywhere), “conspiracy” describes the secret planning of two or more people to commit a crime and/ or bring harm to a third party. Conspiracy is a legal category. By its definition, Assange contends, multinational corporations and their mainly U.S. political enablers have been and are conspirators worldwide. They are criminals who in the name of justice must be brought to heel.

The undeniable evidence of conspiracy is there for all to see.  The vetoing of planet-saving climate change agreements by itself constitutes a crime whose predictable consequences dwarf by orders of magnitude even the Nazi Holocaust. But then there are the other less monumental, but still heinous felonies: the overthrow of foreign governments, the use of torture in general and water-boarding in particular, widespread extra-judicial killings, preemptive wars forbidden by international law,  Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay,  a vast U.S. secret prison system, international renditions, the repudiation of habeas corpus, unconstitutional spying on U.S. citizens, death squads, the use of drones in countries with which the United States is not at war, the  “unintentional” but predictable killing of innocent civilians, the imprisonment (in horrific conditions) of disproportionate numbers of black people on U.S. soil, and much, much more. All of these are indications of conspiracy and national criminal activity on the part of the United States, a rogue state if ever there was one. Imperialism itself represents a criminal conspiracy – the control of one nation by another for the benefit of the controllers.

On the basis of such evidence, Assange and his group have taken it upon themselves to do what the empire’s journalists are afraid to do – to publish the unvarnished and undeniable truth about the crimes of empire. Their method is to publicize the secret internal communications on which any criminal conspiracy depends.  Their sources are whistleblowers who for various reasons desire anonymously to “out” conspiratorial activity in question. The means for doing so are, once again, the informational technologies developed over the last 15 years.  Simply put, Wikileaks provides a highly encrypted website depository to insure source anonymity and take full advantage of distributed digital media power which lies essentially in the hands of the people instead of being centrally controlled by the elite.

How does it work? Assange explains it this way: understand for starters how the U.S. itself describes the conspiratorial network at the heart of the War on Terrorism. The conspirators are widely dispersed across many countries. As a result, they depend on secret communications to coordinate their activities. Picture a wooden board with nails driven in at randomly chosen points. That represents a world map with conspirators unpredictably located across its surface. Now take a thread and wind it around the nails connecting one to the other. The thread represents the lines of secret communication necessary for any conspiracy to succeed. It’s the task of counter-terrorism (counter-conspiracy) to cut those threads.

That’s what Assange aspires to do relative to the international conspiracy represented by secret U.S. and E.U. policy. He wants to make it impossible for that form of secret, terrorist conspiratorial communications to take place. In other words, he’s trying to bring empire to its knees. 

No wonder the U.S. government is panicking. Media personalities have called for classifying Wikileaks as an international terrorist organization. Senators have called for Assange’s   arrest. Some have even suggested his assassination. But understand this: Wikileaks is no more subject to U.S. law than it is to Chinese, Korean or Iranian law. Julian Assange is an Australian. Wikileaks is headquartered in Sweden whose very constitution protects freedom of the press by absolutely protecting journalists from forcibly divulging the sources of their information. Moreover, U.S. officials applauded Wikileaks when it revealed state secrets of its competitors. Hillary Clinton did so in the name of freedom of information.  It is unlikely then that Washington would have supported efforts to extradite Assange or his associates for trial before Chinese, Korean, or Iranian courts on charges of illegally divulging state secrets. Contradicting such posturing by demanding Assange’s extradition to the United States is making Washington (once again!) the laughingstock of the world.

Assange couldn’t be happier. All of this is part of the plan – to rescue the traditional role of journalism from its distortion by outlets such as Fox News. Assange notes the irony: Fox can disseminate what everyone knows are outright lies and be protected under invocations of press freedom. It can allege that President Obama is a communist, a Muslim, not American. It can ridicule climate change as a liberal plot to undermine capitalism. No one in authority advocates shutting Fox down for spreading such disinformation. But let whistleblowers expose the undeniable truth about their criminal employers, and “important people” suddenly find their voices and begin calling for arrest and worse. 

Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not Wikileaks’ disclosures will achieve their utterly radical intended goals. Minimally, they will surely make diplomats, politicians, the CIA, FBI, as well as the business concerns that fund those agents and institutions, more circumspect in their secret communications. In other words, the disclosures have made the business of imperial conspiracy vastly more difficult.

Additionally, Wikileaks has already powerfully impacted the news industry. Not only have its revelations provided a welcome and unimpeachable counterpoint to media misinformation and cooption by the very authorities the media should be scrutinizing. Wikileaks disclosures have become as well the focus of bloggers and the new internet news sources.  It has forced mainstream media to deal with issues they would not otherwise have addressed. Without Assange and his colleagues, many of the front page stories of the last year would never have seen the light of day.  We would not have been sure, for instance, that the U.S. was really behind those assassinations in Yemen. Finally, it will be interesting to see what happens when the torture-related photos and films that President Obama decided to withhold finally hit the fan. Equally fascinating will be responses to future releases of internal communications from within leading financial institutions and multinational corporations. All such information releases threaten the corporatist conspiracies Wikileaks is targeting. In summary, Wikileaks promises to change the news industry, and clearly threatens empire.

Series Conclusion

                It’s easy to become discouraged or depressed by a world falling apart. However the point here has been that the death of the Church, the disintegration of the world economy, and the decline and imminent fall of the “American” Empire by no means constitute entirely bad news. On the contrary, they are all to be welcomed as part of an evolutionary process that finds the new ICT and promising distributed forms of energy at its center. If the process is allowed to reach its promised conclusion before the threatened foreclosure of the human prospect by criminally unaddressed climate change, the process suggests a healthier, saner planet controlled more by people than by corporations and their political servants.  Towards that end, dispersed, distributed popular power in information and energy is at least weakening and at most threatening to bring to their knees the pillars of the world as we know it. The church has already been mortally wounded by it.  The world’s economy will be profoundly and forever changed by it. Governmental and corporate conspiracies will be crippled and possibly ruined by it.

This is what answers to the prayers of progressives and radicals looks like.

Liberation Theology and the Left in Latin America (Fifth in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

 Unlike its counterpart in the United States, the left in Latin America has not lost its sense of mythological reason – i.e. ability to connect the profound truths of ancient myth and story with contemporary problems. Instead, LT has fostered among the third world poor the understanding of Jesus and Paul described earlier in this series. That is, over the last 45 years, LT has used the insights of the poor themselves coupled with those derived from the scripture scholarship of the last century and a half to nurture social activists and social movements, and to sow the seeds of profound social change. 

That’s exactly what happened beginning in the 1960s, especially following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the meeting of Latin America’s National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ in Medellin, Colombia in 1968.

The Second Vatican Council was a precursor of liberation theology. Largely inspired by the loss of the working classes in Europe to communism and socialism, Vatican II attempted to connect with the European left to regain lost terrain. So the church re-presented itself as the servant rather than the opponent of the world. It owned publicly as its official teaching the “best kept secret of the Catholic Church,” viz. its progressive social teachings that first took shape with the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum in 1891. Those teachings endorsed labor unions, higher wages for workers, and government social programs on behalf of the working classes. 

The impact of Vatican II was immediate. Catholics everywhere representing the largest Christian denomination in the world, at last felt free to join in common cause with communists and socialists. The resulting praxis cannot be disassociated with the social revolutions that followed in Europe and in the United States throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s. The near toppling of the French government in 1968 cannot be disassociated from Vatican II and the Catholics it inspired to join students, labor unionists, atheists, socialists and communists marching, demonstrating and rebelling in the name of social justice. Similarly, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement in the United States cannot be explained without taking account of the Catholics who swelled their ranks as a direct result of Vatican II. The same can be said for the women’s liberation movement, the environmental movement, the gay rights movement, the American Indian Movement, the prisoners’ rights movement and others. None of them can be fully explained without prominent reference to the Second Vatican Council and the resulting appropriation of religious mythology by the activist left.

In fact, the civil rights movement itself expressed a kind of black liberation theology – a politicized theology in the black evangelical community. Without the black churches the achievements of the civil rights movement would never have happened. Even Malcolm X who rejected Christianity realized that any social movement that refused to connect with the spiritual is doomed to failure.  He used the teachings of Islam to mobilize African-Americans the same way Martin Luther King Jr. used the Christian tradition as understood in the African-American community.

Meanwhile, in Latin America, the earlier referenced Medellin meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM), sought to apply the teachings of Vatican II to their region. They shifted even further to the left than the Catholic Church in general. In fact, they adopted a liberation theology understanding of the Gospel. They reaffirmed that understanding at Cancun, Mexico in 1973 and at Puebla five years later. In all three cases, they appropriated the LT term, “preferential option for the poor.” That is, they agreed that God’s chosen people are the poor and oppressed, and that the church’s primary mission is to serve the poor in the interests of their liberation – politically and economically as well as spiritually.

More to the point, what had happened with Vatican II and even more so with liberation theology is that for the first time, the left had confronted the right with an extremely powerful alternative mythology to counteract the mythology of what Marx referred to as “the gods of heaven” and the “gods of earth.” Those gods were responsible for keeping Latin America’s poor not only impoverished, but (in Marx’s terms) humiliated, subjugated, abandoned and despised.

The gods of heaven challenged by liberation theology are familiar enough. They can be met at any hour of the day or night on the religious programming so prominent on radio and television. The myths belonging to the gods of heaven rationalize poverty in terms of God’s will. The poor are especially dear to God, of course. But what pleases God is not their struggle for liberation, but patience in this life for the sake of reward in the life to come. 

As for Marx’s “gods of earth,” they are most prominently money, capital, law and market. Traditional prophetic language would refer to them as “idols.” In this 21st century, they are absolute in their power. Ironically, despite their “scientific” and “secular” pretensions, they are no less religious than their heavenly counterparts. For example, there’s something quite revealing about the chairman of Goldman Sachs using theological terms to describe the firm’s mission. “We’re doing God’s work,” he said recently. In Popper’s terms, the dogmas of these gods of earth are entirely un-falsifiable and hence “religious” not scientific in nature.

In other words, the rumors of the dawn of a secular age are vastly exaggerated. Hopefully secularization will be achieved by our children or grandchildren; it has largely eluded our generation. In any case, the myths underpinning the gods of earth include the myth of progress, that of the “Invisible Hand,” the “trickle-down” myth,  as well as the one summarized in Margaret Thatcher’s famous mantra, “There is no alternative” (to corporate globalization).  These gods of earth are unquenchably blood thirsty and demand those 30,000 child sacrifices each day. They demand as well a $2 billion per day U.S. war budget against the infidels who would resist the empire that serves the gods of earth. Those infidels, by the way, are invariably the Third World poor.

Next Friday: The First Religious War of the 21st Century

Trinity Sunday: beyond the gibberish

Readings: Psalm 33: 4-6, 9, 18-20, 22; Deuteronomy 4: 32-34; 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28: 16-20

What a difference a week makes!  Last week, Pentecost Sunday, everything seemed so easy. The disciples received Jesus’ Spirit in the Upper Room. Peter spoke to the crowds in Jerusalem. He proclaimed at the top of his voice that God’s Spirit belongs to everyone. Barriers of gender, language, culture, class, and religion were irrelevant.

What good news and how simple! You and I are vessels of the Holy Spirit; we can channel Jesus’ Spirit any time we choose. We are the way God appears in the world. Treat yourself as God; treat others as God and “be saved” – not in some afterlife, but here and now. Everyone understood Peter’s message whether they spoke Hebrew or not. It was the message of Jesus.

But alas, this week seems to reverse all that simplicity. It’s “Trinity Sunday.” And what can you say about that?  The doctrine is so complex: The Father, Son, and Spirit are One God, but three persons. Jesus is one divine person with two natures (one divine, one human). Through the “hypostatic union,” Jesus is “consubstantial” with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  Dick Vitale would say “Headache City!”

To repeat, no one understands it. And do you know why? Because it really doesn’t make sense – at least to us in the 21st century.  To be charitable, it may have meant something to a very few people in the 4th century. But it sounds like gibberish to us – and probably always has to most people. So do the “clarifications” offered by church councils and theologians. For instance, this is how the Second Council of Constantinople (in the 6th century) shed light on the way Jesus fit into the Holy Trinity:

. . . the union of the two natures in Christ is achieved “according to the hypostasis” (kathypostasin) of the divine Word, or “by synthesis” (kata synthesin), so that from the moment of the incarnation there was in Jesus Christ a single hypostasis/person (subject, autos), of both the divine nature and the human nature, which remains whole and distinct from the divine in the “synthesis” or “composition”.

Aren’t you happy they cleared up the confusion? What we find in a statement like that are theologians who take themselves too seriously. Even worse, they are people who have lost sensitivity to the language of faith which is always the language of metaphor. The fact is, every statement about God is metaphor. “Person” is metaphor; “Father” is metaphor; so are “Son,” “Spirit,” and “Word of God.”  All of that constitutes beautifully imaginative language trying to express the various ways human beings experience the One who is Transcendent and completely beyond the power of words to describe.

Jesus understood metaphor and he kept things simple. More than anything else, he called himself the “Son of Man.” “Son of Man” simply means “human being.” Jesus thought of himself as a human being. You can hardly get more basic than that. By calling himself the “Son of Man” again and again, Jesus emphasized that he is the same as we are. What’s true of him is true of us. “Son of Man” was an expression of solidarity with us.   

If that’s the fact, “Son of Man” makes Jesus’ other title “Son of God” terrifically important for us. I mean besides referring to himself as “the human one,” Jesus apparently also referred to himself as the “Son of God.” So if Jesus is the exemplary “human being” (like us, as Paul said, in all things but sin) and if he’s also the “Son of God,” that seems to mean that all of us are sons and daughters of God just as he was.

It was as if Jesus said: (1) I am a human being like you in every way; (2) You are a human being like me in every way; (3) I am the son of God; (4) Draw your own conclusions. . . . Or better yet, Jesus drew the conclusion for us: Every human being is a son or daughter of God just as I, the human one, am.

But all of that almost sounds blasphemous, doesn’t it? Jesus is God. You are God. I am God. Evidently, theologians from the 2nd century on saw blasphemy there too. So they went into denial and constructed an incomprehensible doctrine of the Holy Trinity to explain how Jesus could be uniquely God who prayed to his Father who is God and sent his Spirit who is also God – all without there being three Gods. Trinity gibberish is the result.

And yet . . .  and yet, there is something “three” about our experience of God – about our experience of life – something that shouldn’t be lost. Think about it. Our initial experience of life is three. There is our father, our mother, and us. That’s our first experience of trinity – and of God.

Besides that, all of reality just in terms of language is described in terms of three. Our verbs are conjugated as 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd – I (or we), you, and it (or they).  Anything we talk about is addressed either as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person. And that includes God. We can talk about God in the 3rd person as St. Paul does when he says “God is love.” Or we can address God in the 2nd person, as we do in prayer, “O God, please help me.” Or we can speak of God in the 1st person as they say Jesus did when he said, “I and the Father are one.”

The fact is that Christians are very good at 3rd person language about God. We talk about God in the 3rd person all the time in homilies like this one. We’re also quite at home using 2nd person references. We do that when we pray, when we address God as “thou” or “You.”  But Christianity’s not very good at 1st person references. We have a hard time – even after Pentecost – acknowledging the divine within us and speaking as Jesus did about our unity with “the Father.”

That’s where we can learn from other faiths. Hindus, for instance, excel at recognizing the divine within each human being.

I remember when I was studying for my doctorate in theology in Rome forty some years ago. I was in a seminar at an international theologate. Aspiring theologians from all over the world sat around that seminar table at the Anselmianum, one of my alma maters in “the holy city.” We were discussing the Trinity and Jesus’ identity as God’s unique Son. One of my colleagues, a priest from Kerala State in India, raised a question that made a profound impact on me. He said, “How are we in India to express Jesus’ supposed uniqueness as the God-Human Being?  In our culture, everyone is believed to be a God-Human Being?” Obviously, I’ve never forgotten that question. It made me wonder: If you translated Hindu concept for concept so it could be understood in the West, would it come out Christianity. And vice-versa.

But even apart from that, the young priest-theologian’s question made me realize how rich Hinduism is in its grasp of what Christians profess to believe. God is present within each of us and in everything we encounter. We can and should act accordingly.

I’d even go so far as to say that Hindu belief in 300 million Gods – yes, 300 million – is more understandable and helpful than the Christian doctrine that there are three persons in one God. The meaning of the Hindu belief is that there are about a million manifestations of God for each day of the year – 300 million for 365 days. It means that if we were really attuned to God, we’d see God’s presence everywhere in every moment of every day.

That sounds a lot like the message of Pentecost; we are temples of Jesus’ Holy Spirit. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

That’s the real message of Trinity Sunday as well.

This Is What the End of Empire Looks Like: The Role of the New Economy

This is the second in a Monday series on the decline of U.S. hegemony.

Last Monday I began this series by connecting the demise of the Catholic Church with that of U.S. Empire. This week’s posting turns to economy. Just as changes in the way people store, access, and communicate information has affected religion, so has it affected the market.

Though that observation may appear axiomatic, even business people have been slow to grasp its implications. For example, the music industry didn’t see file sharing coming; whole companies went under as a result. Encyclopedia Britannica was similarly blindsided by Wikipedia. Newspapers didn’t understand the enormous importance of the blogosphere; consequently, they’re failing at unprecedented rates. Skype threatens huge telephone companies. The computer gives free access to the sports events, movies, and programming cable companies are still trying to peddle.  Colleges and Universities continue to invest in huge unsustainable physical plants even as online courses steal their students. (And why not: distance learning, as J.W. Smith points out, enables students to sit at the feet of the world’s best professors for a fraction of the cost required to maintain those buildings soon to become white elephants.)  

But it doesn’t stop there – not nearly. In The  Empathic Civilization Jeremy Rifkin  argues that a dispersed, decentralized digital revolution together with dispersed, decentralized energy provision equals an entirely new economic era – a third industrial revolution as he calls it. The first industrial revolution, of course, connected the information revolution spawned by the printing press with coal and steam power. Huge factories, the high speed printing necessary for their organization, the eventual emergence of worldwide proletariat, and a previously unimaginable scale of production resulted. 

The second industrial revolution united energy provided by oil with intensified product and information exchange facilitated by telephone, radio, television, cinema, automobile and air travel. Oil was at the heart of it all. An entire civilization was built on Jurassic Age deposits which eventually became the basis of food production, and the manufacture of buildings, clothing, and virtually every product one might care to name. If it wasn’t made from a fossil fuel base, it was packaged and delivered by it. The second industrial revolution gave birth to the consumer society and corporate globalization.

The third industrial revolution is currently emerging from a combination of new information technology coupled with new forms of energy production. The new form of energy production is necessitated by the phenomenon of “Peak Oil Per Capita” as well as by the “carbon-entropy bill” resulting from a global economy relying on oil to support the productive cycle that has emerged over the last 200 years.

Peak oil per capita is different, Rifkin reminds us, from “Peak Oil,” which is controversial. Peak oil per capita is not. It refers to the maximum amount of oil equitably distributed to every human being on earth. It reached its zenith in 1979. Since then though more oil has been discovered, population growth has outrun those discoveries. As a result, less and less oil has been available per capita ever since. Moreover, the relatively recent industrial aspirations of China and India (representing fully 1/3 of humankind) have further lowered the per capita availability of non-renewable Jurassic Age resources. On a per capita scale, we will never have more oil than we do now.

As Rifkin explains, the results of such pressures were seen In July of 2008, when petroleum reached the level of $147 per barrel.  Worldwide economic chaos resulted. Prices of everything skyrocketed. There were food riots in 40 countries. In Rifkin’s terms, that was an economic earthquake. The financial meltdown which occurred 60 days later was the after-shock from which the world has still not recovered. In other words, $147 dollars per barrel seems to be the wall beyond which the current form of corporate globalization cannot pass. We’ve reached “peak globalization.”

And that’s not all. Besides the diminished per capital availability of oil, there’s the “carbon-entropy bill” that must be paid for 200 years’ profligate consumption of fossil fuels. “Carbon-entropy” refers to the negative feedback loop associated with burning oil and gas.   Here’s where global warming comes in. 

However, even those politicians who are not in climate change denial cannot bring themselves to address the problem that threatens the very extinction of human life as we know it.  Rifkin speculates that outdated Enlightenment concepts of human nature formulated by Locke, Smith, Bentham, Darwin, and Freud prevent them from doing so.  Enlightenment and late 19th century thinkers imbedded the mistaken notions that humans are basically individualistic, competitive, utilitarian, materialistic and pleasure-driven. Rifkin suggests instead that humans are instead “empathic.” (But that’s another story.) The point here is that business cannot continue as usual without inevitable economic chaos and threatening the extinction of the human species. The problem is not abstract; we’re talking about a threat our grandchildren will experience as immediate within their lifetimes.

What can be done about it all? Rifkin answers: copy the Europeans. They’ve taken his warnings seriously and have decided to exploit the confluence of the new distributed informational technology and new distributed energy sources to begin shaping an entirely new post-carbon economy. More specifically, they’re betting that the currently available combination of distributed technology and distributed energy can supply 20% of the E.U.’s energy needs by 2020. That’s the goal the E.U. has actually adopted. 

By way of definition, Rifkin contrasts “distributed energy sources” with their “elite” counterparts. Elite energy sources are those found exclusively in “privileged” parts of the world like the Mid-East. They are necessarily centralized, call for long lines of transportation, and must be protected by enormous military expenditures. Distributed technologies are those available to everyone everywhere on earth. They are supplied by the sun, wind, and the earth’s molten core. They include energy available from ocean tides and biomass supplied by so-called “waste products.”

But aren’t these sources precisely too dispersed – not concentrated enough – to satisfy the energy needs of a third industrial revolution worthy of the name? Not so – at least not when coupled with a technology that mimics the model provided by the information revolution that has taken those quantum leaps over the last 15 years. There we’ve found that individual PCs distributed among two billion users are vastly more powerful and adaptable than centralized mainframes. In the digital world 1 + 1 comes out to far more than 2.

The same is true, Rifkin suggests, in the world of distributed energy. If every building in Europe or the United States is turned into a power plant taking advantage of the wind, solar, and geothermal energy sources around it, those mini- power plants end up generating much more than the sum of their individual contributions. The energy can then be stored in hydrogen depots and transmitted to an “inter-grid” modeled on the internet. From there it can be shared freely across continents just as information is currently shared among two billion internet users. Put otherwise, when many small energy producers pool their production a multiplier effect kicks in that far surpasses the capabilities of the single individual.

“Impossible,” you say? Again, Rifkin responds “not so.” In fact, it’s already being done. There are currently office complexes in Spain that produce more energy than they use. To repeat, Europeans have bought into this concept and intend to derive 20% of their energy from its implementation less than 10 years from now.

Think of what all of this means for the topic at hand – the collapse of the corporately globalized economy now unfolding before our eyes. The combination of new informational technologies and new energy sources will affect every facet of life now touched by fossil fuel consumption – i.e. every facet of life, period. It will change the way we eat, travel, house and clothe ourselves. It will affect our cost of living and how and where we work and live. It promises to drastically reduce the size of military budgets that so deplete national treasuries – that is, if the transition can be made before the effects of global climate change take their fatal toll. And that in turn is largely dependent on thwarting the short term planning of the corporatists and their (largely U.S.) political enablers whose criminal strategies of denial and misinformation threaten the very survival of the human race.

This is where Julian Assange and Wikileaks come in. They will be the focus of next week’s posting.

Liberation Theology and the Imperialization of Christianity (Fourth in a Friday Series on Liberation Theology)

If it’s true (as claimed here last week) that both Jesus and Paul proclaimed God’s Kingdom in such stark contrast to imperial Rome, how is it that by the fourth century Christianity found itself allied with Rome? Historical analysis makes it clear that the alliance was the result of the imperialization of Christianity rather than of the Christianization of empire.

To begin with, there are many indications that Jesus resisted empire specifically. Much has been written about this. However, the simplest illustration of Jesus’ opposition is in the famous story of his temptations in the desert. The story is familiar. With variations, it is contained in all four of the canonical gospels. Jesus has just been baptized by John. In Luke’s version, a voice has told him that he is somehow the “Son of God.” He goes out to the desert to discover what that might mean; he’s on a vision quest. He prays and fasts for 40 days. Afterwards come the visions of devils, angels, and of his own life’s possibilities. Satan tests him. In Matthew’s account, the culminating temptation is unmistakably imperial. It occurs on a high mountain. Satan shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth – an empire much vaster than Rome’s. The tempter says, “All of this can be yours, if only you bow down and worship me.” Jesus refuses. He says, “Be gone, Satan! It is written, the Lord God only shall you adore; him only shall you serve.” In other words, Jesus rejects empire in no uncertain terms. The story at the beginning of the accounts of Jesus words and deeds establishes him as anti-imperial.

That opposition to empire is extremely important to understanding what became of Christianity over 1500 years ago, when its leading faction decided to climb into bed with empire. In terms of Matthew’s temptation narrative, orthodox Christianity began worshipping Satan at that point, since in his account Satan worship was the prerequisite to reception of his “gift” of empire.

More specifically, in the 4th century, circumstances made it necessary for the emperor Constantine and his successors to repeat Satan’s temptation – this time to a cooperative faction within the leadership of the Christian church. That faction was asked to allow Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In return church authorities would exercise a kind of co-dominion with Rome. All they had to do was accept empire, give it religious legitimacy – become the state religion. Jesus had said “no” to a similar temptation. Fourth century church leadership said “yes.” In doing so, they effectively said “yes” to Satan worship – the necessary precondition of accepting empire. They also abandoned the Jesus of history and his this-worldly message. In the process, they reduced Jesus to a mythological figure and Christianity to a Roman mystery cult. Here’s how. . . .  

Like all oppressors, Constantine realized that religion represented an incomparable tool for controlling people. If an emperor can convince people that in obeying him they are obeying God, the emperor has won the day. In fact it is the job of any state religion to make people believe that God’s interests and the state’s interests are the same.

What Constantine saw in the 4th century was that Rome’s state religion was losing power. Christianity was spreading rapidly. And it was politically dangerous.  The message of Jesus was particularly attractive to the lower classes. It affirmed their dignity in the clearest of terms. Often the message incited slaves and others to rebel rather than obey. Rome’s knee-jerk response had been repression and persecution. But byConstantine’s day,Rome’s repression had proved ineffective. Despite Rome’s throwing Christians to the lions for decade upon decade, the Jesus Movement was more popular than ever.

Constantine decided that if he couldn’t beat the Christians, he had to join them – or more accurately, co-opt them. And he evidently decided to do so by robbing Christianity of its revolutionary potential. He would do so, he determined, by converting the faith of Jesus into a typical Roman “mystery cult,” a form of religion that was extremely popular in 4th century Rome. Mystery cults were “salvation religions” that worshipped gods with names like Isis, Osiris, and Mithras. Mithras was particularly popular. He was the Sun God, whose feast day and birth happened to be celebrated on December 25th.  Typically the “story” celebrated in mystery cults was of a god who descended from heaven, lived on earth for a while, died, rose from the dead, ascended back to heaven, and from there offered worshippers “eternal life,” in return for joining the cults. There the god’s body was eaten under the form of bread, and the god’s blood was drunk under the form of wine. The unity thus achieved assured “salvation” after death. 

To convert Christianity into a mystery cult, Constantine (who wasn’t even a Christian at the time) convoked a church council – the Council of Nicaea in 325. There the question of the day became who was Jesus of Nazareth. Was he just a human being? Was he just a God and not a human being at all? Was he some combination of God and man? Did he have to eat? Did he have to defecate or urinate? Those were the questions. For Constantine’s purposes, the more divine and otherworldly Jesus was the better. That would make him less a threat to the emperor’s very this-worldly dominion.

The result of all the deliberations was codified in the Nicene Creed: 

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things   visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

In terms of understanding the imperialization of Christianity, it is important to notice here how the Creed jumps from the conception and birth of Jesus to his death and resurrection. It leaves out entirely any reference to what Jesus said and did. For all practical purposes it ignores the historical Jesus described earlier in this series. It pays attention only to a God who comes down from heaven, dies, rises, ascends back to heaven and offers eternal life to those who believe. It’s a nearly perfect reflection of “mystery cult” belief. The revolutionary potential of Jesus’ words and actions relative to justice, wealth and poverty is lost. Not only that, but subsequent to Nicaea, anyone connecting Jesus to a struggle for justice, sharing, and communal life is classified as heretical. That is, mystery cult becomes “orthodoxy.” Meanwhile, Jesus’ own proclamation of a this-worldly “reign of God” in opposition to the “reign of Caesar” becomes heresy. The same is true of Paul’s understanding of “the wisdom of God” in making the poor and despised his chosen people. In that sense, the post-Constantine, post-Nicaea church was founded not only against Paul, but against Jesus himself. Christians in league with empire have been worshipping Satan ever since.

Next week: Liberation Theology and the Left in Latin America

Pentecost and Vatican II: “A Readers’ Theater”

For this week’s homily, imagine your local pastor using his sermon time to lead the following “readers’ theater.”

Readings for Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104: 24-34, 35b; Romans 8:22-27; John 5:26-27; 16:4b-15

Pastor:  Here we are almost half way through 2012. The Mayans told us that this would be a year of profound change in planetary consciousness. The astrologers tell us the Age of Aquarius is actually dawning now – Jupiter aligning with Mars and all that. Yet if you read the daily newspapers we seem to be in anti-2012 mode, don’t we? Anger and harsh words, war and conflict dominate from Afghanistan and Iraq to Chicago and Camp David. Can this really be the dawning of a new age of “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust?”

Fittingly in our rather darkened context Pentecost calls us to open ourselves to a radically new and hopeful consciousness. And the calendar has poised us to do just that in an unprecedented way. I say that because precisely this year, 2012, marks the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. I want to suggest this morning that by observing that anniversary properly, we in our very own parish could  invite Jesus’ Holy Spirit to visit us here – to make Pentecost among us as never before. Observing the anniversary of Vatican II in the spirit of Pentecost could truly transform us all.  

Hold that thought.   

Before returning to it, let’s try to get the flavor of the first Christian Pentecost.  To help us with that, I’ve asked six people from our community to perform a little “readers’ theater” with me. Readers, please come forward. (A group of six emerges from the congregation, and stands scripts in hand in a semi-circle before the community. The group includes men and women of all age groups.)

Pastor: Recall the picture Luke paints this morning in the first reading. . . . Jesus’ disciples have been gathered in their Upper Room safe-house since they realized on what we call “Ascension Thursday” that Jesus was gone for good. They’re a group of Jewish men and women with a strong sense of being God’s Chosen People. They’re not Christians at all. They’re Jews who think they’ve found the messiah in Jesus. For them, the Jews are God’s chosen; no one else is. And yet as they share remembrances of Jesus in that Upper Room, they find their narrow religious consciousness challenged by recollections of the Master. Imagine their conversation:

Reader One: I’m feeling really abandoned. I mean, what are we going to do now that the Master has left us for good?

Reader Two: What do you suppose he wanted us to do when he told us to return here and wait for the Spirit?

Reader Three: I don’t know. But let’s see what happens. Jesus has never let us down. He’s never been wrong.

Reader Four: We still have our memories of him, don’t we? I think those could guide us.

Reader Five: No trouble there. Jesus seems to be all we’re talking about these days. (Laughing) Remember when he talked with that Samaritan woman?  We were all so shocked. Speaking alone with a woman – and a Samaritan on top of that!

Reader Six:  Yes, he didn’t seem to have much trouble crossing boundaries or scandalizing us, did he? Women, men, Pharisees, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, the poor who loved him so much – even Roman soldiers and members of the Sanhedrin; he engaged them all.

Reader One: And he cured Samaritan lepers too.

Reader Two: Somehow, he seemed partial to Samaritans, didn’t he?”

Reader Three: Yes, and, you know, he fed those 4000 non-Jews across the Lake just as he did the 5000 on our side. That confused me. How could he do that? It was like he was saying that they mattered as much as we do. To me it seemed like a slap in the face.

Reader Four:  And that gentile woman from Syro-Phonecia? She bested Jesus in debate. I still laugh about it. Here he was virtually calling her a dog, and she disarms him completely by saying, “Yes, but even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”

Reader Five: That was the only time I ever saw him outwitted. And he loved it! He couldn’t stop laughing either. And she wasn’t even a Jew, was she? Do you think she taught Jesus something about God’s love for gentiles?

Reader Six: And what about that Roman soldier, remember him? Didn’t Jesus say the centurion showed more faith than any of us?

Reader One: What was he talking about? That centurion was our oppressor. How could a man like that have faith?

Reader Two: It was like he was showing us that there shouldn’t be any barriers between people – like all peoples, not just the Jewish community, are God’s people.

Pastor: Story after story like those must have been shared. And then someone said:

Reader Three: You know, I’ve been thinking . . . Jesus wasn’t the first of our prophets to show openness to everyone – not just to Jews. Didn’t the Prophet Joel say something about a future when God’s spirit would be poured out on everyone without exception?

Reader Four: Yes, he did.  I’ve committed those lines to memory. Joel said:

 I will pour out my Spirit78on all kinds of people.79

Your sons and daughters will prophesy.

Your elderly will have revelatory dreams;80

Your young men will see prophetic visions.

 Even on male and female servants

I will pour out my Spirit in those days

And everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord

Will be saved.

Reader Five: What if Jesus was the fulfillment of Joel’s vision – no division between “kinds of people,” none between parents and children, young and old, men and women, servants and free? Maybe when we were with the Master we were living out Joel’s dream.

Reader Six: That’s a good point – a really good point. I don’t know about you, but I need some space to think about what’s just been said. (All agree.) Let’s all take some time for silent prayer.

Pastor: So the community in that Upper Room prayed – though they didn’t know exactly what for. They opened themselves to what they remembered about Jesus – to Jesus’ Spirit. After a long time in prayer someone said:

Reader One: Somehow, I’m feeling different now – like a huge burden has been lifted from my shoulders.

Reader Two: And I as well. My fear seems gone. It’s like a violent wind has blown through my mind, and everything has become clear.

Reader Three: My heart feels like it’s on fire.

Reader Four: And the rest of you are simply glowing – is that fire I see over your heads. (Everyone laughs)

Reader Five: You know, we may finally have learned what Jesus was trying to teach us. Everyone is God’s chosen, especially the poor and people like Jesus himself – the illegitimate, the immigrants, the outlaws, tortured and executed.

Reader Six: That’s incredible. It’s time for us to share this Good News the way the Master did. I think we’ve received Jesus’ Spirit.

Pastor: So all the disciples went out in the street.  Peter made a speech and told everyone what they had experienced. He used that text from the prophet Joel. Surprisingly, everyone understood as if language barriers didn’t exist. It all seemed so simple now and made so much sense to everyone. . . . (Pause)

Thank you, readers. (The readers return to their places. When everyone is settled, the pastor continues.)

Pastor: What a beautiful vision of church and reconciliation. So worth celebrating on a day like today, on Pentecost Sunday. 

But, you know, the vision was lost in the matter of a generation or two. It was. Soon the Pentecost story would be interpreted to mean “Yes anyone can receive the Spirit of Jesus, but to receive it you have to be baptized. To be saved you must call upon God’s name in Christian terms.” All other approaches to God were seen as invalid. Within three centuries, soon after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, those refusing baptism would be put to the sword. Subsequently, the return of the old narrow way of thinking – this time Christian — led to pogroms against Jews, Crusades against Muslims, to the Holy Inquisition, burning of witches, to the holocaust of Native Americans, and to cold and hot wars against “godless” communists.

The time is coming, Jesus warns in today’s Gospel, when killers will do their bloody work in God’s name – in Jesus’ name. That, in fact, happened historically. The Dark Ages were long and bleak. The partisan violence and wars surrounding the Reformation period seemed unending.

But then came the Second Vatican Council. As I said earlier, it began 50 years ago on October 11th 1962, and ended in 1965. So this is its Silver Anniversary. As initiated by John XXIII and implemented by Pope Paul VI, Vatican II sought to recapture the spirit of the first Pentecost as described in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles this morning. Vatican II broadened Catholics’ narrow ideas about God. It recognized freedom of conscience as a human God-given right. The Council was “ecumenical” meaning that it no longer saw Protestants as enemies, but as sisters and brothers. Vatican II recognized that Jews and Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims are all “calling on the name of the Lord” and so can be saved even though we hardly know or can pronounce their names for God. The Second Vatican Council was monumental. Its significance was cosmic.  

However, once again sadly, the church of the 21st century risks losing the Pentecost experience in a matter of just two generations. There’s a return of a narrow understanding of Christianity that contradicts Vatican II. And at times one can even get the feeling that the narrowness is coming from the church’s highest offices. Often church leaders give the impression that Vatican II, which remains the official teaching of the Catholic Church, is now somehow heretical. So we must backtrack on liturgical reforms. We must insist on the privileged position of Christianity in relation to other faiths, and of Catholicism in relation to Protestant denominations.   

Our parish council has decided not to allow our church to be swept along with that reactionary response. More positively, we want to seize the opportunity that the Silver Anniversary of the Council presents. That’s what I meant at the beginning saying that we want to “make Pentecost” here as never before. So we’ve chosen today’s feast to announce a three-year renewal program that we hope will revitalize our parish. The program will begin with an old-time tent revival on our front lawn next October 11th.  Our Parish Council’s President will give the details in a brief presentation immediately after Mass.

All of this is geared towards making 2012 that special year the Mayans promised. We want this fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II to bring the “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust” promised not by the Age of Aquarius, but by the New Order Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of God.

Join me then in opening ourselves to the Spirit who, Paul tells us in today’s second reading, “prays through us.” Allow the Spirit to pray through you now.

 Come Holy Spirit. Fill our hearts as you filled the hearts of the disciples on that first Pentecost. Renew our parish. May God’s kingdom come.

 (The pastor sits. While everyone prays, “The Age of Aquarius” plays in the background.)