The
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
St.
Augustine’s Episcopal Church
Tempe,
Arizona
The
Rev. Albert P. Krueger
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon
me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I
cannot attain it.
Psalm 139:5-6
The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of
the children of God.
Romans 8:19
The Bible
is full of things remembered and things to be remembered. There is no culture without the
remembrance of events which made the culture what it is. Things remembered come to mind after
they have had their effect on the human soul and spirit. They aren’t remembered because somebody
thought they were important at the time they occurred. They are remembered, because it is impossible
for people to forget them.
The
story of Jacob’s Ladder is a remembrance.
Who remembered what, exactly, is not the defining question. What we have is what was remembered. The angels went up and down the ladder,
and so it was a holy place. Bethel
became one of the early pilgrimage sights for the House of Jacob. They knew they could find God there.
Also
remembered was Bethel’s decommissioning.
The first literary prophet, Amos, had harsh things to say about Bethel,
“On the day I punish Israel for her sins, I will destroy the altars of Bethel;
the horns of the altar will be cut off and fall to the ground.” (Amos
3:14) The story of Israel, the
Northern Kingdom, was coming to an end.
Abram had
pitched his tent at Bethel hundreds of years earlier. Bethel, as a location was a defining place for the
Israelites. To remove Bethel would
be, for us, like removing Faneuil Hall in Boston. For Roman Catholics and Western Christians in general, it
would be like destroying Vatican City in Rome. The foundations of culture were shaken when Bethel came
down. The shaking started long
before the Assyrian Army overran the Northern Kingdom and took the Ten Tribes
into permanent exile.
We
watched “Saving Private Ryan” over the sixth of June weekend. Americans remember the beaches of
Normandy. That location is a type
of Bethel for us. To desecrate an
American grave in Normandy would be to desecrate America. Normandy is one of our holy
places. This year, our nation
commemorated the 70th anniversary of the landings at Utah and Omaha
Beaches. The events of June 6,
1944, are worth remembering and to forget them, as a nation, would be a
tragedy.
It is
difficult not to get caught up in the cultural remembrance of heroic
events. Just as Bethel was a
defining place and moment for the Northern Kingdom, Normandy on the morning of
June 6, 1944, is a defining place and moment for the United States of
America. When that date appears on
the calendar each year, everything that being an American means to its citizens
is brought to mind. We use
remembrances and commemorations such as this to find our focus as a nation in
the present and to clear a path of expectation for the future.
It is so
difficult not to take part in the spirit of cultural self-esteem and
self-assurance that it becomes easy for the Church to forget other moments
which are equally, if not more, defining for the world and for the Kingdom of
Heaven. One of those moments we
might commemorate today, July 20.
This is the day, 70 years ago, that conspirators in Nazi Germany made a
belated and stillborn attempt to assassinate their Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.
‘Seventy’
is one of those significant Biblical numbers. Like the other sacred numbers, three, four, seven and
twelve. It is not a quantifier but a qualifier. These numbers have mnemonic value, and they are an aid to
remembering the memorable and forgetting the forgettable. Seventy, the heavenly number seven
times the ‘earthly’ number ‘ten,’ indicates a time for remembering and forgetting,
because that which was will be no longer, but that which is to come is already
here.
When
Terah was seventy, he fathered Abram.
Abram was the tenth in the line of Shem. Everything that we refer to as “Semitic,” today, was present
in Abram. The other nine
descendants are forgotten, except in a list in an ancient text we call “The
Bible.” When the seventy years
were over, the remnant of Judah left Persia and returned to Judaea. The entire history contained in what we
call the “Old Testament” was complete, and the Jewish Commonweal to come was present
in the building of the Second Temple.
When Jesus sent out seventy disciples, the chasm between the “Old” and
the “New” was a finality.
And so we
celebrated the landings at Normandy, this year, counting out seventy
years. Next year, we will remember,
I trust, another seventieth anniversary, this one involving a bomb called
“Little Boy” and the instantaneous vaporizing of around 150,000 human souls
accompanied by a life sentence of hideous sickness to many more. We are living in propitious times. Between 20 July and 6 August, 2015, a
host of seventieths will happen, then culminating in the Great Seventieth on
September 2, VJ Day, 2015.
The
assassination attempt involved two kinds of people, disgruntled army officers
and devoted Christians, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them. The officers hoped to restore lost
honor; the Christians knew they had already lost more than that. The German Confessing Church, formed by
Bonhoeffer and others in 1934, was a direct challenge to Hitler’s claim of
absolute authority over the moral, spiritual and physical lives of all
Germans. The famous Barmen
Declaration was their declaration of war before the War. Barmen’s battle-shout was Luke 10:18, “Behold,
I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven.”
Bonhoeffer,
already imprisoned by the Nazis, chose to support the assassination plot after
years of grappling with the classic moral theology he had been taught. His decision was that, for the
Christian, the likes of Hitler must not be allowed to live. The evils of which he was the earthly
source had to be stopped by killing the source. This is the moral theology which July 20 represents. The tidy distinctions between Church and
State had already been obscured by the descent of spiritual powers to earth,
unseen and unrecognized for a thousand years, the pagan precedents of Western
Civilization.
In popular national mythology, World War
II was the Good War won by the Greatest Generation. Those titles obscure two important realities - that
subsequent generations, no less great than those drafted in the 1940’s, are
still picking up the pieces from that conflict and that the Nazi ideal was
defeated on earth but not in heaven.
The reverse Lord’s Prayer,
that what happens in heaven might
follow suit with what happens on earth, does not hold. Nazi armies in German uniform were
overwhelmed: The Nazi Spirit lives
on. Satan did fall like lightning
from Heaven in the form of pre-cultural spiritual authorities spearheaded by
the dancing Valkyries of Der Ring.
In
his epic work, The War of the World, 20th Century Conflict and
the Descent of the West, the historian Niall Ferguson comes to this
conclusion: “This was no simple
war of evil against good. It was a
war of evil against lesser evil.
For the Axis powers did not collapse spontaneously under the weight of
their own depravity. They could be
vanquished only by the application of immense and contrary force. But this in turn required terrible
moral compromises on the part of the Western powers. It seemed as if the Axis could be defeated only by turning
their own inhuman methods against them.”
The earthly armies were defeated only
with the help of the fallen heavenly army.
If
Hitler was the conception of Realized Evil, World War II was birth-pangs and
Little Boy was its birth. 150
years of Romantic exaggeration changed the concept of war from Clausewitz’
“total defeat of the enemies forces on the field of battle” to “total defeat of
everything that constitutes the enemy, mind, body, and soul.” This country’s rightly esteemed
“Marshall Plan” resurrected new versions of old nations, but the Valkyries
maintained their appeal in all the political maneuvering that followed.
In the
last seventy years, “Little Boy” has reproduced like a Mother of Thousands, and
Hitlers regularly pop up like Whack-a-Moles. As Ira Chernus, author of Mythic America and Apocalypse
Management, remarks, “Finding another Hitler is an old habit.” Slobodan Milosevec, Saddam Hussein, Ali
Husseini Khamenei, Osama bin Laden and Bashar al-Assad, even George W. Bush,
Binyamin Netanyahu and Barrack Obama, have all been honored with the title
“Another Hitler.” The Holocaust
that World War II was for everybody is now a slow-cooking fiery furnace in
which the Nebuchadnezzars of the contemporary world simmer the Shadrachs,
Meshachs, and Abedniggos.
The idea of total annihilation as
punishment for any perceived offense saturates our emerging cultural
instincts. A fleeting traffic
glitch leads to fatal road rage; teenage angst morphs quickly into random
slaughter in school halls; politics tends toward a “win at any cost” agenda. It isn’t Global Warming that we
need to fear as much as it is the fiery furnace heating up within us. Trying to pull out the weeds won’t do,
as Jesus has advised. The roots of
these issues go deep, and they are intimately entwined one with another as our
own emotional and intellectual patterns.
The violence involved in our misguided attempts to root out evil can
only lead to an end in which there is no harvest at all.
Some
years ago, our Episcopal House of Bishops issued a pastoral letter in which it
was declared, “We live in apocalyptic times.” Adolf Hitler is our Avatar of the End. Like Shredder, the Joker, or Kirk’s
Khan, he keeps showing up with ever more destructive intent, and we revel in
Masters of the Universe cartoons, because we can see no other way out. A choice between speeding up the End
and delaying the End is no choice at all.
The greatest Post-Modern irony is that we are still, metaphorically,
trying to keep Hitler from developing the atomic bomb. Jesus doesn’t return to this
world: Godzilla does.
A
Biblical Seventy Years has passed since that moribund attempt to kill Adolf
Hitler took place. Since then, the
powers that be have still been trying to assassinate Hitler day in and day out,
with no more success than that enjoyed by the Plan Valkyrie conspirators,
Stauffenberg, Rommel, and Bonhoeffer.
Hitler may be a matter of perception, these days, but we look for him everywhere. Like Tinkerbell, we keep him alive by
clapping for the myth. The
perceiving is guaranteed, and the weeds continue to grow. It seems that Mick Jagger’s voice was
prophetic when he sang, “All the cops are criminals and all the sinners
saints.”
In the
midst of a similar apocalyptic moment, a young man ran up to Jesus and fell on
his knees. “Good teacher,” he
asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered.
“No one is good – except God alone. You know the commandments: “Do not murder, do not commit
adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your
father and mother.” “Teacher,” the
man declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.” Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give
to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.” At this,
the man’s face fell. He went away
sad, because he had great wealth.
The
cultural commandments we have all kept since we were boys and girls won’t get
us into the Kingdom of Heaven. We
will not inherit eternal life, the abundant life that Jesus promises, by trying
harder and harder to make the old rules work better and better. The dominance of nation over nation is
a matter for God to decide, not the citizens of the nations of the world or any
particular nation. This isn’t
fatalism, it is wisdom. The
Southern Kingdom, Judah, was transformed, and its value as a stake-holder in
the community of nations changed. Byzantium
held on to the last, long enough to provide the Renaissance with the fuel which
was needed for cultural revival in the West. The last vestige of Western hegemony, the British Empire,
the United States of America, is morphing into something new right before our
eyes.
It is the
Church’s job neither to force these inevitabilities nor to try to delay
them. The End of the World is
God’s prerogative. Jesus is saying
to you and me, “Why do you call yourselves good? No one is good – except God alone.” We have our national Shechems and
Shilohs, our Abrams who have pitched their tents between Bethel on the East and
Ai on the West, our Normandies, Ardennes Forests, and Pearl Harbors. These we can remember and commemorate
with honor, but the future cannot be constructed by their endless
repetition. God is changing
things, and whatever God does is good.
Throughout
my lifetime, the doomsayers have used the classic example of the so-called Fall
of Rome to decry the state of the union.
Edward Gibbons is as ubiquitous as the Adolf Hitler. Every moral and spiritual glitch is
seen as another sure sign of decay pointing to the urgent need for
reformation. We are deceived by
our own myths of victory to believe that civilizations come and go as quickly
and as suddenly as Nazi Germany did.
As happened to Rome, as happened to Germany, so will happen with us.
Nazi
Germany was not a civilization: It
was a blip on the timeline of a declining civilization. Edward Gibbon aside, Rome did not
“fall”: it changed gradually over
centuries into an entirely different world. The so-called “barbarians” didn’t invade so much as they
arrived and built suburbs. The
transition from what we call the “classic world” to what we call “Western Civilization”
happened over time too slowly for anyone to perceive without foreknowledge and
faith. Hadrian’s Wall was built
and disintegrated in a moment of history; the Maginot Line was bypassed. So, too, no wall around any nation will
hinder the changes that God has in mind.
So, that
seventy-years’ mark is today.
Whether or not you believe in the truths of apocalyptic theology or the
significance of Biblical quantities, any responsible analysis of the last
seventy years of history, such as Mr. Ferguson’s, will point to the same
conclusion. Apocalypse is an
extended period of time when Chronos, the numbering of days and years, merges
with Kairos, the time of God’s purposes.
The task of the Church, of those who believe in Jesus, is to pay
attention, to stay awake, to be alert, as it says so many times in our New
Testament.
The
Biblical Seventy indicates that that which was will be no longer, but that
which is to come is already here.
The real greatest generation is growing up all around us. There is no
time to lose and no time to gain, and the words of the Apostle Paul in Second
Corinthians, written in the greatest time of cultural upheaval and
transformation, are as true today as they were two thousand years ago, “At an
acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped
you. See, now is the acceptable
time; see, now is the day of salvation!”
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon
me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I
cannot attain it.
Psalm 139:5-6
The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of
the children of God.
Romans 8:19
