July 11, 2010
Scripture:
Deut 30:9-14
Luke 10: 25-37
I think I'm invited to talk today because the community is interested to hear what the mission group that Fred Taylor, David Hilfiker, Hayley Hathawy and I are in is up to. And I think that the 8th Day Faith Community has embraced this model of sharing the responsibility for delivering sermons because we like to try to acknowledge the gifts that we each bring from our unique experiences and perspectives. So that's what I'm going to try to do!
I'll start with the mission group.
Our mission group is called the Bridge to Hope, and that name comes in part from the book by James Gustav Speth called The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Many of you participated in a Sunday morning class last fall when we studied the book together. The book spells out the complex relationships of the crises that the world faces today. One of these crises is global warming, caused by humans and leading to global climate change. Another crisis, I barely need to remind you here on day 82 of the BP pollution disaster in the Gulf Coast, is the misuse of natural resources leading to catastrophic destruction of the environment. Speth talks about these environmental crises and how it's extremely difficult to do anything about them in the face of political and financial systems that are dependent on economic expansion and ever-greater resource consumption. Furthermore, as these crises build on one another, the exploitation of the poor stands to worsen.
Those of you who were in the class with us in the fall may have encountered the same feelings I did. The more we talked about these issues, the more I felt scared about the future.
According to NASA climate scientist James Hansen, global warming is taking us quickly in a direction "not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed or to which life on earth is adapted." I'm afraid that if the planet will become less habitable, and societies break down, that the values I hold dear will be threatened. If the condition of the planet is going to deteriorate rapidly, and struggles for scarce resources will worsen, we all know that the marginalized and the poor will suffer more than the rest of us.
On top of this fear I feel when confronting these crises, I am sad, knowing that I am complicit in the systems that contributes to ever-greater global destruction and worsening exploitation of the poor. I know it is not all my fault nor is it all my job to try and solve this, but I don't know how to unravel that.
These are part of what motivated me to engage in the work of this mission group, and the feelings that I brought with me to the project this urgent, enormous, impossible project.
So, our mission group came together feeling called to do "something" about the interrelated crises.
In his book, Speth expresses hope that there might be something to be done about these crises. He acknowledges, though, that for the needed big, systemic, political change to take place, such comprehensive change will require a change in worldview or a change in consciousness. Speth hopes that a change in consciousness would allow us to confront these crises with a vision for a system that can maintain the world and its people justly and sustainably.
Ok, so a vision! A change the world consciousness! That's what we need! Now what?
What does it take to walk a group of people through challenging all of their frames of reference to question everything? For example, what if our whole society consumed only what it needed and our political system wasn't dependent on economic growth? How does a community question the systems within which they live and by which they might define themselves?
Well, this audience knows and our mission group's core inspiration is - that Jesus' audacious life was all about challenges like these challenging everything.
Our mission group looked for help with this question how do we question our consciousness in order to arrive at an alternative way of looking at the world. We got a lot of help from Walter Breuggemann and his book The Prophetic Imagination.
Breuggemann juxtaposes the dominant consciousness with the alternative consciousness and he talks about moving from one to the other can help make room for vision prophetic imagination to expand the realm of possible paths.
Breuggemann's primary example in the book is to contrast Pharaoh's ways with those of Moses, who brought a transformative message, lead his people to freedom and ultimately built an alternative community.
Are you with me?
The dominant consciousness is characterized by:
- A Politics of oppression and exploitation,
- an Economics of Affluence: System that tolerates and even thrives on inequality. There's a stark division between the haves and the have-nots. To be affluent and have that status is good and protected. The poor suffer, and the rich have a strong vested interest in keeping the unequal system going. Bureaucracy is built up to justify the system and perpetuate it.
- A Religion of God's domestication: Religious leaders tell us that God is on our side. Not only is there political and economic justification to keep things as they are, we behave as though we believe that God wants things to stay as they are. You all know what this looks like. This is the God of the Crusades, and the God of George W Bush.
Contrast this with the Alternative consciousness Moses and the prophets call us to politics of justice and compassion and economics of equality and fairness. Hayley in her sermon a few weeks ago reflected on Sabbath economics. The Mosaic community and the early Christian community called for equitable distribution of goods according to need, and accommodations for sharing with the poor and forgiving debt. And God in the alternative consciousness? We see the Religion of God's radical freedom. God is accessible to all who approach, but is not summoned by a dominant order for its own purposes. God is free to come and go. This is the God of Harriet Tubman, who we believe supports our escape to freedom, who might be pray to as we run through the woods at night, and who might be able to deliver us from the slave catchers. The God of Oscar Romero, who spoke the truth but whose people saw a decade more war after he died and tens of thousands more deaths before the war ended. If you're looking for the God who backs the winners every time, this is not that God. If you're looking for the God who hears the cry of the poor, that's what you've found. But certainty? No. You've found mystery, and that's what we get to live with.
Where does the dominant consciousness come from? Well, it comes about whenever the powers and principalities have the chance to gel and to grow structures around themselves and to distort the systems away from compassion and toward perpetuating themselves. When the human face is lost and the opportunity for compassion is diluted, in the numbness, the dominant consciousness has the opportunity to build up.
Brueggemann's examples of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, show us that scripture repeatedly provides a path to challenge the dominant consciousness in order to arrive at a consciousness that is open to alternative visions for the world.
After the example of Pharaoh, Breuggemann gives the example of King Solomon's dominion Solomon's Israel has become established, comfortable, and prosperous. In the Religion of God's Domestication, Solomon's Israel may even have been seen as the fulfillment of our text from Deuteronomy this morning. The returns of labor, children and descendants, livestock have all multiplied, and now Solomon has to protect them, with a standing army, and a bureaucracy that justifies the existence of the affluent.
So do you follow me? What at one time had been an alternative community has developed a dominant consciousness.
Here's another example, apropos the 4th of July. Benjamin Franklin was creating a whole new alternative nation when he and the other authors of the United States' founding documents took the huge risk to lead to establish a new country from an imperial outpost. The values were liberty and equality! And a whole lot of other things having to do with landowners. But Franklin reflected on the weaknesses within the US Constitution and knew that adjustments would need to be made along the way.
Throughout human experience, dominant systems build up, and then need to be challenged by the alternative community.
That's a helpful framework, right? So, how to we get from dominant consciousness to alternative consciousness? I'm going to try and talk about that through today's scripture.
The episode in today's Gospel is a story most of us have known since childhood, a lesson on the way we are called to live as Christians.
The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all show us Jesus embracing, as the central teaching on the Hebrew scriptures, 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind' from Deuteronomy 6:5 and from Leviticus 19:18 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Matthew and Mark put these words in Jesus own mouth, but in Luke, the scholar quotes these laws to Jesus. But then he asks for clarification. "Who is my neighbor?" the scholar asks.
Unique to the Gospel of Luke, we get the parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable is meant to be shocking, and to challenge the audience to an alternative way of looking at the world.
Our first shock is an incidence of extreme personal violence. A man is brutally attacked on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jesus audience would have known the road from Jerusalem to Jericho as a very dangerous passage. This windy, hilly road with switchbacks that provided hiding places for attackers. In Jesus day, the road was known as the "Way of Blood" because "of the blood which is often shed there at the hands of robbers." The road from Jerusalem to Jericho taps into a deep-seated fear for Jesus' listeners.
The second shock is that the leaders we want to believe in fail miserably. The broken body of the attacked man, in desperate need, is ignored by those who should be his model "neighbors." The priest and Levite are esteemed for their place among the people and known because they are dedicated to holiness. But in the story each one of them in turn thinks of himself first. Maybe one assumes that the man who has suffered the attack is dead and he'd would be defiled by handling the corpse. Maybe one is concerned that this is a trap that if he stops to care for this man who looks injured, bad guys who are waiting nearby will to attack them. Whatever the story, each finds justification not even crossing the road to look.
If love for neighbor meant anything, it meant to care for the "sons of your own people." But these guys cannot be bothered.
We expect the leaders of our community to uphold our moral values, especially if they are our religious leaders. In this case, the leaders fail, pretty badly. And we the listeners, we're let down. This is sad. This might even be pitiful.
Loving my neighbor as myself is one of the two laws that can lead me to inherit eternal life, and Jesus is challenging me to question whether my community is capable of responding at all. These religious leaders may be ignoring this big rule - compassion using the excuse of a littler rule not to be defiled through contact with a corpse. We see religion enforcing the politics of oppression and economics of exploitation. It has become part of the dominant consciousness.
Sad. Disappointing.
A 3rd shock is the discovery of who does the right thing.
The right thing is not just a little bit right. This guy is obviously the whole enchilada. In this dangerous no man's land of deserted territory, the hero takes the chance of stopping, looking, and - increasing his own vulnerability taking care of this man to the best of his ability and leading the man on his beast to an inn.
And who is our hero? He is a despised Samaritan! The hated enemy! In the Gospel of Luke about one chapter before this one, we read of Jesus and his disciples finding themselves unwelcome in a Samaritan village. When James and John hear about how the Samartian village won't have them, they ask Jesus, "Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?" "Sure!" Jesus says. JUST KIDDING! I know you're listening. No, of course not. Jesus turns and rebukes James and John and they carry on to another place. Anyway the point it that there's considerable mutual animosity between the community of Jesus' audience and Samaritans.
And in this story, it is the hated enemy who is the hero with a human heart. On this road, he's maybe even more at risk than any of the other guys in this story. This hero comes out of left field.
Jesus is walking his audience through a challenge to their consciousness.
First, we confront a moral outrage that's so scary what we really want to do is look away. Next, our solutions disappoint us badly. Compassion has lost, it's out the window. It is painfully obvious to us how wrong that is. And we are sad.
And then what? With our frame of reference damaged anyway, the hero comes from where we least expect it. Compassion floods into the story, but we never would have guessed how it would have gotten there.
So what have we got? And what's this got to do with the Bridge to Hope mission group?
In the class that we've taught once so far at the Servant Leadership school, we tried to follow a similar sort of model.
Examine scary truths you'd rather ignore. Notice that the solutions you counted on aren't working. Mourn the places where you see that you've been disappointed, and where compassion has gone out the window. And with your frame of reference shaken up, embrace discontinuity. Break from imperial reality. In 7 classes!
With our 8th class, we opened up the discussion and asked our classmates what brings them hope, and what is their vision for moving forward positively in the face of the challenges before us. What we found was that hope comes from widening vision.
I'll end with an example of a change that I find hopeful and it's from my own career.
What do you think of when you think about the challenge of homelessness? Do you think it is something that can be solved, or, while you might be sad about it, do you think of it as an inevitable part of our society?
Prior to the 1980s the sight of people living in cars, churches, shelters, on the streets, or out in the woods was a distant memory of the Great Depression. In most cities, there was plenty of affordable rental housing, including very inexpensive single room occupancy housing. But in the 60s, 70s and 80s, that changed. The supply of affordable rental housing decreased dramatically and hospitals for people with mental illness were closed down in favor of community-based care but that system didn't see the amount of investment that is required to really meet needs.
And here we are today where, in my lifetime, we're accustomed to homelessness, even though it only became a persistent, visible problem in the 1980s and even though most other developed countries hardly have an issue of street homelessness at all.
About a decade ago, some alternative thinkers asked homeless people what they wanted, and what they heard was "housing." Don't try to fix me, just give me a place to live. And so a new model emerged.
The old model was to try and get homeless people to behave differently get sober, follow the rules, and maybe you'll be deemed to deserve housing. The new model, called "Housing First," everybody deserves housing. Homeless people, especially the really sick, hard to serve folks who had been homeless for a long time, get into housing where they can then get a chance, with lots of help, to address their various health and other issues.
Here's a weird part big advances in this way of thinking came about under the GW Bush administration. HUD under the GW Bush administration pumped more investment into this model to solve chronic homelessness. They were motivated because studies showed that providing Housing First to chronically homeless people cost the same or less than it cost to leave these folks homeless to consume emergency room services, jail nights, homeless shelter nights and other services, plus housing these folks was unquestionably more humane.
With the help of this "Housing First" model, chronic homelessness declined about 30% since 2005.
Building on the success of these kinds of programs, I'm happy to say that last month, the federal government adopted a plan to end homelessness in the United States. Nineteen cabinet-level federal agencies signed on and committed to end homelessness for the chronically homeless and veterans in 5 years, and families, youth and children in 10 years.
The federal government has come out to say that homelessness is not inevitable, but that it can be solved, and that we will solve it.
Is there a chance that the structures that get built to implement this plan could get overwhelmed by dominant consciousness thinking and miss out on opportunities for compassion, especially as it gets bigger and more complex?
You betcha. Alternative consciousness thinkers will have to defend compassion while keeping an eye on these structures.
But would you have imagined 5 years ago that the federal government would commit to end homelessness in America?
Me neither.