The Trajectory of Hope

The Trajectory of Hope--November 9, 2018

"Come, behold the works of the LORD;
     see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
    he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; 
    he burns the shields with fire.
'Be still, and know that I am God!
    I am exalted among the nations,
    I am exalted in the earth'." [Psalm 46:8-10]

At the last, God will take our weapons away.  That will be the sign both of God's ultimate victory, and of our complete peace--when we are all, utterly disarmed in the presence of God.

Now, to be sure, we will need to have the conversation about how we try and carve out peace and safety in the mean time for ourselves, our children, and for the children of our neighbors near and far.  And yes, that conversation will need to include the question of how we use weapons today, as nations, among community police, and as individuals, to try to preserve that peace and to cultivate that safety, as well as is humanly possible.  

I will readily concede that each of us may have different conclusions on how we do or do not use weapons to defend those whom we love, or to make us feel that we could use them if we felt we "had" to.  And I live day by day knowing full well that most of the people with whom I interact day by day are likely to have very different views from mine on the value of having, or deliberately not having, weapons in my house for just that purpose.  I am also well aware that my own willingness to take a bullet, or even to die, in such a situation--in a house, in a church, in a theatre, or wherever else--may sound too extreme to some.  That is all right. We can have that conversation any time you like, and we can have a standing open invitation for coffee to talk about it.  And it will be OK if we do not end that conversation coming to agreement; we can live with the difference and still be able to look one another in the eye (even if that is a skill that is becoming increasingly rare in this day and place).  

So, yes, we can in good conscience have differences of opinion on whether you choose to own, say, firearms, in your home, or what kinds of safety measures would be wise in our homes, communities, and public spaces.  That is called having a society, and free societies always involve people of differing opinions trying to make as good a common life together as possible, while navigating the gray areas of life that are not always crystal clear to us as we live through them.

But what strikes me as absolutely, unflinchingly clear from the Scriptures is this vision of God's promised victory.  At the last (perhaps if only at the last), God will take our weapons away from us, and we will be glad of it.  And not only will God wrest the bows and spears and swords from our fearful hands, but God will snap them over the divine knee like I have to snap sticks over my knee from time to time to stop my son and daughter from hitting each other with them.  And even though my children may be upset with me for a time when I have to take away the things they are using to hurt each other, they are also no longer able to be hurt by the sticks I snap in two, either.  And they are safer for it, because they live under my household, in which I can ensure their relative safety from each other.  Even if they don't like it at the moment, my "rule" over them as parent makes them safer because I can limit the ways they hurt each other.

And it seems to me rather telling that again and again in the Scriptures, the vision of poets and prophets is captivated again and again by the idea of a victorious God snapping spears in two and beating swords into plowshares.  The prophets envision a day when we will not learn war any longer.  And they dream (by the inspiration of the Spirit) of a day when we will not live in fear of each other any longer, despite the many nations we all come from (see Isaiah 2 and Micah 4 on this point).  The psalmist here, too, envisions the greatness and the victory of God in terms of destroying our capabilities to kill each other, and God's presence stilling the violence in our blood.  When God speaks, "Be still and know that I am God!" it is not a vaguely inspirational suggestion for meditation, but the strong declaration of a parent taking away the sticks from fighting children who have been at each other's throats and need to be calmed down.  The God who says, "Be still," after all, is the One who just got done smashing up our spears and shields.

And interestingly enough, when the prophets picture what it will look like when God's victory is complete at the last, they do not envision the angels handing out swords and spears to each person to keep our neighbors from trespassing on our lawns.  You'll never see a passage in the Scriptures where God starts doling out weapons and saying, "Here--trust in these.  These will save you."  Always the opposite--God takes away our weapons, and takes away the weapons of our enemies, and snaps them over the divine knee so that we cannot kill each other anymore, and God says, "Be still now--I will be the one to keep you safe, not your arsenal."

Now, again, I know we are talking about God's promised future, and God's final victory, which are quite different from the rottenness and evil of the world in which we live.  I am under no illusions about the dangers of the world around us, and I am only too aware that for many the only logical approach for dealing the possibility of violent people around them appears to be having the means of using violence back at them to keep the threats at bay.  Again, I'll make the invitation--let's have coffee or lunch if you would like to talk about it, and I will listen before I speak.  I promise.

But the future we look toward makes a difference in how we live our lives, too.  The direction of our hope, the trajectory of our trust, it will affect how we live in the present moment here and now.  And so it matters--even if it is a prophets' dream for a future day--that the psalmists and the poets and the seers say that God's victory disarms us as it embraces us, because that vision reminds us not to get too comfortable with violence as a  final, or even temporary, solution, and not to pretend that there are not human costs to our longing for feeling "secure."

As I write, we are on the verge of the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht--the terrible night when coordinated violence ravaged countless Jewish homes, businesses, synangogues, and neighborhoods across Nazi Germany, and where the elected government chose to look away in order to allow such destruction as "the Night of Broken Glass." It was a travesty in which some people used weapons, and their government used indifference, to dehumanize Jewish neighbors--making it socially permissible without consequence to destroy their property, terrorize their families, and make them into the dangerous "other."  And once the perpetrators got away with it without an outcry from the public to stop, Kristallnacht paved the way for Auschwitz and the Final Solution.  But it began with a night of bat and clubs smashing windows, and no one stopping them from using them.

It is also less than two weeks since a gunman opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue near us in the city of Pittsburgh, killing eleven people because he had been taught to think his victims were dangerous "others" who were working to bring even more dangerous "others" into the country.  

It has been less than a week since a mass shooting in a yoga studio, committed, we believe now, by a man frustrated and incensed at the women around him, whom he felt "owed" him their affection but would not give it.

And it was just in the last 48 hours as I write that another shooter killed a dozen people in a bar in the supposedly "safe" Thousand Oaks community in California, with six off-duty police officers already there on site when the gunshots began.  At the present moment, there is not a widely known motive for this horrific act. And frankly, we are getting numb to the frequency, the intensity, and the seeming randomness of these kinds of events.

There is something wrong with us, something terribly broken with humanity as a species, that we are so self-destructive.  When it is my children chasing and threatening to hit each other with sticks from the yard, the amount of damage they can inflict is limited--but the possibility is there in seed form.  When it is the Tree of Life synagogue, the stakes are impossibly higher. And when it is the long shadow still cast by the broken glass of Kristallnacht with sledgehammers and clubs, which yet carry the smell of ovens over all of it, too, there is no way of ignoring the terrible scale of our self-destructive power.  

That capacity for inflicting death--our remarkable ability and willingness to kill each other--is compounded by our cleverness at inventing new and more efficient weapons to kill each other with, our indifference when it happens in "someone else's community," and our divisive impulse to treat "the other" as dangerous, insidious, and worthy of our violence. In other words, we are good at killing to begin with as a result of our inborn fight-or-flight instincts, and we have only gotten better at destroying ourselves the more we equip ourselves with tools of death, numb ourselves with apathy when it happens somewhere else, and persuade ourselves that "those people" we have chosen to see as "other" are dangerous, or criminal, or less-than-human.  From Kristallnacht to the mass shootings in America eight decades later, it is all the same terrible impulse to destroy the "dangerous other" whose lives we have decided have less worth than our own because they are different.  The kinds of weapons, the tools of death, change.  But the impulse to destroy what is "other" out of an insecure need to protect what is "like me" is the same.  

And it is killing us.  

No... we are killing us.

And that is why we so deeply need to hear the relentless vision from the poets and prophets of the Scriptures that God's ultimate victory will snap all of our sticks and spears, our rifles and rockets, over the divine knee and throw them into the burn pile.  That is why we need the dream of those seers that God will teach us how not to learn war anymore.  That is why we need to hear the Scriptures' insistence that God's way of healing our capacity for death is not to give the "good guys" new and better weapons to get the "bad guys" with," but to change these bent and broken hearts of ours so that we are no longer drive to kill what is other.

And that is why we need the silencing power of God's authoritative "Be still!" and to hear it, not as a harmless quiet morning meditation, but as the verdict of the parent who must stop the children from hurting each other because God loves both of the fighting kids.

God's solution--like any decent parent--is not to give the kid with no sticks a shovel, so that they can both pound the daylights out of each other.  But God's victory snaps the sticks in half and confiscates the shards, and teaches all the children not to destroy each other, because they belong to each other.

This is the hope we are given.  This is the future toward which the Scriptures say God is directing history.  As I say, we can be quite honest that we do not yet live in that world where our sticks and stones and spears are all put away.  And we can discuss how and where they may yet be necessary in this terrible and dangerous world.  But we should at least be clear of where God has set the trajectory of the universe--one day the weapons will all be splintered wreckage or garden tools, and we will rejoice to see that God has, in the words of the great hymn, "cured our warring madness."

May it be so.  May it be so before another Kristallnacht, before another Thousand Oaks, before another Tree of Life Synagogue.  May your victory come, O Lord, and your peaceable reign disarm us all.

Lord God, snap our sticks over your knee and heal this heart of mine, with all its impossible mix of fear and hatred and apathy.  Let your victory win out in my heart, too.  Disarm me.